SECRET SOCIETIES AND 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 



By the Same Author 
ANNA VAN SCHURMAN 

ARTIST : SCHOLAR I SAINT 

MAXIMS OF A QUEEN 

ETC. ETC. 



SECRET SOCIETIES 

AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
TOGETHER WITH SOME KINDRED 

^ STUDIES BY UNA BIRCH ^ 



LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
NEW YORK : JOHN LANE COMPANY : MCMXI 



-^ 






IAN 2 mz 



THE BALLANTYNE PRESS TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN LONDON 



I have to thank the proprietors and 
editors of the Edinburgh Review and 
The JSIineteenth Century and After for 
permission to republish these essays 

Una Birch 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

SEfCRET Societies and the French Revolution 3 

The Comte de Saint-Germain 65 

Religious Liberty and the French Revolution hi 

Madame de Stael and * Napoleon : A Study in 

Ideals 181 

Bibliography 247 

Index 253 



SECRET SOCIETIES AND 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 



'jThe appalling thing in the French 
Revolution is not the tumult, but the 
design. Through all the fire and smoke 
we perceive the evidence of calculating 
organisation. The rnanagers remain 
studiously concealed and masked ; but 
there is no doubt about their presence 
from the first." 

Lord Acton : *' Lectures on the French 
Revolution," p. 97. 



SECRET SOCIETIES AND 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

THE Spiritual life of nations, if it could 
be fully revealed, v^ould alter many of 
the judgments of posterity. New in- 
terpretations of ancient tragedies and crimes, new 
motives for speech and action, new inspirations 
for revolution and war might then present them- 
selves for the consideration of the historian. If 
it needs divination to discern the aspiration and 
desire enclosed within the ordinary human soul, 
how much more does it need divination to read 
aright the principles and incentives that lay 
behind historic actions ? Diviners have not 
written history, and professional historians have 
generally chosen to deal with facts, rather than 
with their psychological significance. Because 
of this preference, certain conventions have 
grown up amongst the writers of history, and 
certain obvious economic and social conflicts 
and conditions have been accepted as the 
cause of events, at the cost of repudiating that 
mystical and vague, but ever constant idealism, 

3 



Secret Societies 



which spurs man on towards his unknown 
destiny. 

Especially has this been the case in dealing 
with the origin of the French Revolution. 
Nearly all secular historians have ignored the 
secret Utopian societies which flourished before 
its outbreak ; or have agreed that they had no 
bearing, direct or indirect, upon the actual sub- 
version of affairs. Since the world has always 
been at the mercy of the idealists, and since 
human society has ever been the object of their 
unending empiricism, it is hard to believe that 
the greatest experiment of modern history was 
engineered without their co-operation. More 
than any other age does the eighteenth century 
need its psychologist, for more than any other 
age, if interpreted, could it illumine the horizons 
of generations to come. 

Amongst the historians who have attempted 
to explain the forces which brought about the 
great upheaval of the eighteenth century there 
have been priests of the Catholic Church. To 
the elucidation of the great problems involved 
they have brought to bear knowledge and dili- 
gent research, but we must recognise that the 
black cassock is the uniform of an army drilled 

4 



and the French Revolution 

and maintained for a specific purpose, and that 
purpose is war against much that the Revolution 
stood for. Two priests, Barruel and Des- 
champs, who feared the cryptic confederacies, 
wrote books to prove that the purpose of the 
secret societies before and after the great 
Revolution was not the betterment of the con- 
dition of the people, but the overthrow of the 
Church, the destruction of Christian society, 
and the re-establishment of Paganism. How- 
ever much preparation may have been required 
to enfranchise thought, no great measure of 
organisation or mystery was or is needful to 
enable men to live as Pagans if they so desire, 
and little meaning is to be extracted from this 
theory unless it be realised that in some of these 
works freedom of thought and Paganism are 
interchangeable terms. Secular amateurs of the 
curious and unexplained have written desultory 
books on the same secret societies, and in the 
early nineteenth century the works of Mounier, 
de Luchet, and Robison attracted a good deal of 
attention ; but save for these special pleaders it 
has been accepted that there is little of practical 
moment to be noted of the connection between 
secret societies and the Revolution. In the 

5 



Secret Societies 



books which have appeared since that date there 
has been a conspicuous absence of any new 
material or of any fresh treatment of old 
theories. Many general histories of masonry 
have been published exalting masonic influences; 
but, speaking solely with reference to France, 
no effort has been made by any scientific or 
unprejudiced person outside masonry to explain 
the increasing membership of secret societies, 
the greater activity of lodges of all rites during 
the years that preceded the Revolution, and 
the sudden disappearance of those lodges in 
the early months of 1789. Nor has it been 
attempted to place these important factors 
in progress in right relation with the other 
inducements and tendencies which drove eigh- 
teenth-century France to accomplish her own 
liberation. 

Le Couteulx de Canteleu, who wrote on the 
general question of the secret societies of the 
eighteenth century,* professed to have access to 
documents that gave his words importance and 
weight, and his book, though slight in character, 
is one of the most interesting studies on the 
subject. Papus (Gerard Encausse) has written 
* " Les Sectes et les Societes Secretes." 
6 



and the French Revolution 

on individual founders of rites and on some 
mystical teachers of the day, and Amiable, an 
eminent mason, has published a pleasant record 
of a particular lodge up till the year 1789, 
as well as a short summary of the influence 
of masonry on the great Revolution. The 
published information is fragmentary, as is to 
be expected in view of the nature of the subject, 
and the difficulty of grasping the work of the 
confederates as a whole is insurmountable until 
further light is cast upon their methods and 
instruments ; for though the general drift of 
the underground social currents has frequently 
been discussed, and though occasionally a 
microscopic inquiry has been made into cere- 
monial and the lives of individuals, owing 
either to lack of material or lack of sincerity, 
books dealing with these matters are incomplete 
and partial accounts of what, properly investi- 
gated, might prove to be a vast co-ordinated 
attempt at the reconstruction of society. 

It has been the convention for most historians 
to ignore such activities, just as it has been the 
practice of priests to recognise in them the 
destroyers of all morality. Louis Blanc and 
Henri Martin, in their respective histories, 

7 



Secret Societies 



each devote a chapter to the discussion of 
secret societies. The former speaks of masonry 
as *^a denunciation indirect but real and con- 
tinuous of the miseries of the social order," 
as ^^ a propaganda in action," " a living exhor- 
tation." With the exception of these and a few 
other authors who from time to time allude to 
the secret societies, historians have elucidated the 
crisis of the eighteenth century with no estimate 
of their influence. Taine, of whom it may be 
said that his thesis occasionally determined the 
choice of his facts, does not number them among 
the origins of the new conditions in France. 

The Great Revolution has been assumed to be a 
spontaneous national uprising against oppression, 
privilege, immorality in high places, and condi- 
tions of life making existence a burden for the 
proletariat. Such a theory would cover the 
rebelHon that razed the Bastille and caused the 
clamour at Versailles, that destroyed the country 
houses and killed the nobles; but it does not 
cover the intellectual and social reforms which 
were the kernel ot the Revolution, and its true 
objective. These, on the other hand, have been 
too easily attributed to the publication of the 
'' Encyclopaedia,'' and of certain other volumes 

8 



and the French Revolution 

by Beccaria, Rousseau, or Voltaire. Books 
were undoubtedly partially responsible for the 
awakening of the educated classes. The ration- 
alist presses in Dublin, the Hague, and London, 
poured pamphlets into France to be sold by 
itinerant booksellers, who hawked them in 
country districts concealed beneath a thin layer 
of prayer-books and catechisms. But the 
pamphlets and books more often found their 
way to the public pyre than to the domestic 
hearth, and it can hardly be argued that these 
irregularly distributed volumes were directly 
responsible for the Revolution, though they too 
formed one of the contributory agencies of that 
cataclysm. 

Men have said that liberal ideas were in the 
air, and that no one could so much as breathe 
without inhaling them ; but this suggestion is 
meaningless, for to say ideas are '* in the air " 
is to say many people hold them, which is 
hardly a way of accounting for their being held 
by many people. A suggestion so unsatisfying 
constrains us to seek the causes of contagion in 
a theory of more direct contact. If a book 
would not set a midland village on fire to-day, 
how much less would it have done so in the 

9 



Secret Societies 



olden days when the poorest classes were com- 
pletely unlettered ? The *' Encyclopaedia " and 
the works of economists and philosophers 
made their appeal in intellectual circles, and 
those words of reasonableness and light scarcely 
could have illumined the mental twilight of the 
lower bourgeoisie, much less have penetrated 
the darkness in which the peasant classes lived. 
Yet the Revolution, as its results testify, was a 
national movement towards a new order of 
affairs, and not a general declension towards 
anarchy. Therefore, since a spontaneous up- 
heaval is unthinkable, and the history of smaller 
revolutions leads us to infer that revolution is 
always the result of associative agitation, it 
probably originated in a certain co-ordination or 
ideas and doctrines. These ideas and doctrines 
must have been widely diffused and widely 
apprehended, yet they could not have been 
spread by ordinary demagogic means ; for not^ 
only was freedom of speech prohibited, but it 
was illegal to publish unorthodox books. The 
publication of the " Encyclopaedia " was for- 
bidden in 1759, ^^^ ^o\\\ Frederick the Great 
and Catherine of Russia offered asylum to its 
authors. Till a few years before the Revolution 

10 



and the French Revolution 

it had been the custom to silence murmuring 
minorities by sword or fire. In 1762 the pastor 
Rochette died for his opinions, and the three 
Protestant brothers Grenier were decapitated, 
ostensibly for street brawling, but in reality for 
their faith. Monsieur de Laraguais was pre- 
sented with a 'Mettre de cachet" for the citadel 
at Metz, for reading a paper in favour of inocu- 
lation before an assembly of the Academy in 
Paris.* His defence was that by his advocacy 
he hoped to preserve to France the lives of the 
fifty thousand persons who died annually of 
small-pox. So associated had imprisonment and 
execution become with the holding of liberal 
ideas that when Boulanger died almost coinci- 
dently with the publication of his book " Les 
Recherches sur le Despotisme Oriental," men 
speculated whether his death could be attributed 
to natural causes.f " B61isaire," a moral and 
political romance by M. de Marmontel, pro- 
voked a tumult. Bachaumont relates that the 
Sorbonne saw fit to protest against Chapter XV., 
" which treats of Tolerance." J In consequence 
the book was suppressed. ''La Confession de 

* " Memoires Secret de Bachaumont," vol. i. p. 286. 

t Ibid, vol. ii. p. 292. % Ibid. vol. iii. p. 168. 

II 



Secret Societies 



Foi d'un Vicaire Savoyard " exerted an extra- 
ordinary influence in unseating existing authori- 
ties. It was what the publication of the Bible 
had been to Germany, an obligation to private 
judgment. The author of this book after this 
effort fell back on making laces since he could 
not take up his pen without making every power 
in Europe tremble. 

How is it possible that, when such penalties 
threatened the efforts of writers and speakers, 
ideas of progress could be cherished in thousands 
of minds, and the passion for social regeneration 
flame in countless souls } Though there was no 
enunciation of liberal hopes in the market-places, 
yet an invisible hand, as in the day of Daniel, 
had written in flaming letters the word " brother- 
hood " across the tablets of French hearts. Was 
the dissemination of ideas, and the diffusion of 
enthusiasm, to be accounted for by the spirit of 
the age ; or did the theory of the modern State 
generate spontaneously in the minds of French- 
men } Was the great Revolution a mere accident, 
or was it the inevitable result of co-ordinated 
ideas in action } Taine was of the opinion that 
the doctrines propagated themselves, carried 
like thistle-down upon the winds of chance. 

12 



and the French Revolution 

The obvious inference to be drawn from his 
opinion is that the social idealists of the eigh- 
teenth century lacked either the courage or the 
zeal to further their beliefs ; and that they, 
unlike their forerunners or their successors, were 
ready to entrust their hopes to the written word, 
and leave the rest to the gods. It is making 
too great a demand on human credulity to ask 
man to believe this, and many significant facts 
witness to the hitherto unestimated work of the 
secret societies in furthering the cause of popular 
emancipation. Ideas are not suddenly converted 
into swords. Men must have hammered patiently 
and hard upon the anvil of the national soul to 
produce the keen-edged, swift-striking blade ot 
revolution. 

*'The aim of all social institutions should be 
the amelioration of the physical, mental and 
moral condition of the poorest classes," said one 
whom Barruel alluded to as ** a demon hating 
Jesus Christ." The speaker was Condorcet,* a 
man acquainted with the ideals of the secret 
societies. In announcing the eventual publica- 
tion of the " History of the Progress of the 

* At the Loge des Philalethes, Strasbourg, p. 41, 
Robison. 

13 



Secret Societies 



Human Mind," a work interrupted by his 
death, he spoke of the destruction of old 
authorities by invisible associations. *' There 
are moments in history," said George Sand, 
" when Empires exist but in name, and when 
their only life lies in the societies that are hidden 
in their heart." Such a moment for France was 
the reign of Louis XVI. 

Legends of secret societies survived in every 
part of Europe at the opening of the eighteenth 
century. They existed for the prosecution of 
Theurgia as well as Goetia, for masonry as well 
as mystical philosophy. Speaking generally, 
their interest did not lie in the region of politics 
or polemics, but in that of study, experiment, 
and speculation ; and their chief care was the 
preservation and elucidation of ancient hermetic 
and traditional secrets. As a rule the Church had 
persecuted such societies, though her prelates had 
frequently condescended to the study of magic, 
and a few among them like Pope John XXIL had 
spent long nights in alchemical experiment. It 
remained for the Utopians of the eighteenth cen- 
tury so to interpret the symbolism of the secret 
societies, so to affiliate them, and so to organise 
the forces of masonry, mysticism and magic, as 

14 



and the French Revolution 

for a few years to unite them into a power 
capable not only of inspiring but of precipitating 
the greatest social upheaval of Christendom. 

It is difficult to believe or understand, that 
bodies holding differing doctrines, adherents of 
many rites, disciples of divergent masters, ever 
commingled for a day in their enthusiasm for 
the common cause ; yet this singular and Hege- 
lian amalgamation seems in practice to have 
taken place** The principal force in the trinity 
of masonry, mysticism, and magic was masonry, 
and it, like many other innovations, was intro- 
duced into France from England. Just as 
Voltaire and Rousseau derived their philosophy 
from English sources, and applied the theories 
they absorbed in a direct manner to the life of 
their own country, so did the French people 
derive their masonic institutions from England, 
and apply them for purposes of social regenera- 
tion in a fashion never even contemplated in the 
land of their origin. The English Deists, Hume, 
Locke, and Toland, were responsible for the 
intellectual regeneration of France, just as the 
Legitimist lodges planted in that country after 
the Stuart downfall were responsible for the 
* p. 344, v°^' ^V' Barrucl. 
IS 



Secret Societies 



many lodges of tolerance, charity, truth, and 
candour which disseminated the seeds of the 
humanitarian movement on French soil. The 
Pantheisticon became the model of French 
societies. 

Until the sixteenth century masonic corpora- 
tions in England and other countries consisted 
of three purely professional grades holding the 
secrets of the architectural craft, the mysteries 
of proportion, and the true canon of building. 
The epics in grey stone our cathedral towns 
enclose memorialise the tradition of the older 
masonry, and testify to the inviolability of its 
secret formulae. In every Catholic land, from 
Paris to Batalha, from Salisbury to Cologne, 
rise the superb conceptions of the masonic mind: 
serene, unchallengeable symbols of doctrines, 
mysteries, and myths, the venerable shrines of 
uncounted memories. During the sixteenth 
century England became the motherland of a 
newer masonry. Another spirit then permeated 
the craft ; mysteries as ancient as the canon of 
building and the lost word of the Temple, 
Egyptian rites and Greek initiations, were 
blended with the purer traditions of the past. 
Rosicrucians, like Francis Bacon and Elias 

i6 



and the French Revolution 

Ashmole, joined the hitherto exclusively pro- 
fessional body. Out of this marriage of 
thoughts and aims arose the modern masonic 
system, of which England at the end of the 
sixteenth [century alone knew the secret. So 
thoroughly was the old system transfused with 
speculative ideas that by 1703 it had been de- 
cided that the antique guild model of masonry 
should be abandoned for a scheme of wider 
comprehension, embracing men holding certain 
common ideals and aspirations irrespective of 
craft or art. By this decision masonry became 
really free ; though the actual bases on which the 
future of the new " speculative," as the develop- 
ment of the old ^'operative" masonry, was to 
be established, were not laid down till 17 17 by 
a commission of the Grand Lodge of London. 
Sir Christopher Wren, the last of the Grand 
Masters of the older organisation, was followed 
in his great office in two successive years by 
foreigners — A. Sayer and Desaguliers, who in- 
augurated a more cosmopolitan era, and assisted 
in weaving the strands of brotherhood between 
England and foreign lands. 

Though legend ascribes the English Revolu- 
tion and the ascendency of Cromwell to masonic 

17 B 



Secret Societies 



influence, records reveal and attest that the 
associative faciUties masonic gatherings aiForded 
were found favourable during the Civil War 
to the contriving of Royalists' plots rather 
than to the promotion of Republican schemes. 
Charles II. was a mason, James II. was 
championed by lodges, and both the Pretenders 
instituted rites with the object of accomplishing 
their own restoration. 

The Legitimists first introduced Freemasonry 
into France. Lord Derwentwater, the brother of 
the Lord Derwentwater who had been beheaded 
in 1 716, was one of the earliest masonic mis- 
sionaries. Together with Maskelyne, Heguerty, 
and others, he founded the first lodge in France 
at Dunkerque in 1721, the year in which the 
Regent died. Other lodges were inaugurated 
in Paris in 1725, all with the intention of 
rallying supporters of the Stuart cause. These 
were granted charters from London, and were 
ruled over by a Grand Master, called Lord 
Harnwester, of whom little is known. The 
most interesting personality among the Legiti- 
mist votaries was Andrew Michael Ramsay, 
commonly called the Chevalier. The son of a 
baker, he was educated at Edinburgh Univer- 

i8 



and the French Revolution 

sity, and became tutor to the two sons of 
Lord Wemyss ; then going to the Netherlands 
with the English auxiliaries, he made friends 
with the mystical theologist Poiret, and in 
consequence of the latter's quietist influence, 
gave up soldiering, and went to consult Fenelon 
about his future. He soon became the Arch- 
bishop's intimate friend, as well as a convert to 
his Church, and remaining with him till his 
death found himself the legatee of all his 
papers, and thus the designated chronicler of his 
life. This life was published at the Hague in 
1723, and in the following year Ramsay went 
as travelling tutor to the two sons of James 
Francis Edward. On his return to Paris he 
continued his tutorial work in other families, 
combining it with the most strenuously active 
masonic life. He professed to have derived his 
elaborate and numerous rites from Godfrey de 
Bouillon, and managed to popularise masonry 
and exalt it into a fashionable pursuit. Gradu- 
ally the English lodges in Paris became a 
subject of curiosity and conversation in society, 
and so long as they remained concerned with 
the affairs of a foreign kingdom they were left 
undisturbed by the officials of their adopted 

19 



Secret Societies 



country. When, however, Frenchmen began 
to enrol themselves as masons, and some ex- 
clusively French lodges were founded, the 
newspapers alarmed the public by announcing 
that Freemasonry had become the vogue. 
Police regulations were at once issued to pro- 
hibit meetings, and Louis XV. forbade gentle- 
men his Court, and even threatened with the 
Bastille those who attended lodge gatherings. 
A zealous commissary of police, Jean de 
Lespinay, spying on a meeting held at Chapelot's 
inn, ordered the assembly to dissolve ; but the 
Due d'Antin responded by commanding the 
official interloper to retire. He went meekly 
enough, but Chapelot was deprived of his 
licence a few days later, and fined a thousand 
francs. Masons surprised at the Hotel de 
Soissons were imprisoned in Fors TEveque, 
and notice was given to innkeepers that on 
sheltering such gatherings they made them- 
selves liable to a fine of three thousand francs. 
These edicts stimulated the curiosity of the 
public, and every one became inquisitive as 
to the aims and objects of the mysterious 
association. Mademoiselle Cambon, an opera- 
singer, managed to extract a document from 

20 



and the French Revolution 

her lover containing instruction on masonic 
ritual. It was easy then to parody their 
practices. Eight dancing-girls executed at her 
instigation a "^ Freemason ballet," while the 
Jesuits of the Dubois College at Caen made 
their rites the subject of a pantomime. 

In 1737 the old and amiable councillor of 
Louis XV., Cardinal Fleury, forbade good 
Catholics to attend at the lodges, and the next 
year Clement XII. condemned Freemasonry in 
a bull. Notwithstanding this opposition the 
craft grew numerically, and under the protective 
influence of the Grand Master, the Due d'Antin, 
some of the educational work which forms 
their greatest claim to historic recognition was 
undertaken. In 1738 the Grand Master urged 
all masons to help in the work of the great 
Encyclopaedia, and to assist in forming " that 
library which in one work should contain the 
light of all nations." He alluded in his speech 
to the experiment made previously in London, 
and appealed for subscriptions for the further- 
ance of the French work. His secret corre- 
spondence with enlightened sympathisers in all 
parts of Europe enabled him to announce to the 
lodges in 1740 that the advent of the great 

21 



Secret Societies 



work was eagerly awaited in every foreign land. 
Masonic subscription made possible the com- 
mencement of the work by Diderot in 1 74 1 . It 
proof were needed to show that in France, in 
its most corrupt days, men existed who were 
preaching brotherhood, love, equality, and 
freedom, the proof exists in the speeches of 
the Due d'Antin, who was a Revolutionary 
half a century before the Revolution. A dis- 
course delivered by him at the '* Grande Loge 
solennellement assemblee a Paris*' reveals his 
attitude and that of his associates towards the 
feudal society of his day ; 

"Leshommes ne sont pas distingues essentielle- 
ment par la difference des langues qu'ils parlent, 
des habits qu'ils portent, des pays qu'ils occupent, 
ni des dignit^s dont ils sont revetus. Le monde 
entier n'est qu'une grande republique, dont 
chaque nation est une famille et chaque parti- 
culier un enfant. C*est pour faire revivre et 
repandre ces essentielles maximes, prises dans 
la nature de I'homme, que notre societe fut 
d'abord 6tablie. Nous voulons reunir tous les 
hommes d*un esprit eclaire, de moeurs douces, 
et d'une humeur agreable, non seulement pour 

22 



and the French Revolution 

I'amour des beaux arts mais encore plus par 
les grands principes de vertu, de science et de 
religion, ou I'interet de contraternite devient 
celui du genre humain entier, oii toutes les 
nations peuvent puiser des connaissances solides, 
et ou les sujets de tous les royaumes peuvent 
apprendre a se cherir mutuellement, sans 
renoncer a leur patrie. . . . Quelle obligation 
n'a-t-on pas a ces hommes superieurs qui, sans 
interet grossier, sans m6me ecouter Tenvie 
naturelle de dominer ont imagine un etab- 
lissement dont I'unique but est la reunion des 
esprits et des coeurs pour les rendre meilleurs, 
et former dans la suite des temps une nation 
toute spirituelle ou sans deroger aux divers 
devoirs que la difference des etats exige, on 
creera un peuple nouveau qui etant compose 
de plusieurs nations, les cimentera toutes, en 
quelque sorte par le lien de la vertu et de la 
science.*'* 

A well-informed person revealed to the world 
some of the masonic secrets of equality and 
tolerance.f The author, whose ladyhood was 

* "Une Loge Ma9onnique d'avant 1789/' p. il. 
t " La Franc- Ma9onnerie, ou r6v61ations des mysteres 
des franc-ma9ons." Par Madame * * * 

23 



Secret Societies 



probably fictitious, was merely printing and 
making public the aspirations of all those who 
were longing to assist at the eventual social 
regeneration of France : 

"II est tres naturel de deviner le secret des 
francmagons par Texamen de ce qu'on leur voit 
pratiquer constamment. lis entrent sans dis- 
tinction les grands et les petits ; ils se mesurent 
tous au m^me niveau ; ils mangent ensemble 
pele-m^le ; ils se repandent dans le monde 
entier avec la meme uniformite. II est done 
plus que probable, concluai-je, qu'il n'est 
question chez eux que d*une magonnerie pure- 
ment symbolique, dont le secret consiste a b^tir 
insensiblement une republique, universelle et 
democratique, dont la reine sera la raison, et le 
conseil supreme I'assemblee des sages." 

When the Due d'Antin's grand mastership 
ceased, a temporary debasement of masonry 
resulted. Great abuses crept into the craft, for 
under his successsor, the Comte de Clermont, 
lodges were irregularly established, and dignities 
were sold. Androgynous societies, the cause of 
continual scandal, were established. The Society 
of Jesus also endeavoured to disrupt masonic 

24 



and the Fre7ich Revolution 

organisation, and very speedily the ** Grande 
Loge " split up into factions. The Comte de 
Clermont possibly was the servant of the Church 
and the real promoter of the schisms of his 
society. He had blended the careers of cleric and 
soldier in a curious manner, for though tonsured 
at nine years old, and subsequently dowered 
with rich abbeys, he was enabled later, through a 
Papal dispensation, to enter the army, where he 
quickly rose to commanding rank, and showed 
himself as useless a general as he afterwards 
proved himself a Grand Master. As his 
working substitutes in the " Grande Loge de 
France " he nominated a financier named Baure, 
and a dancing-master named Lacorne. For 
eighteen years the " Grande Loge de France " 
was convulsed by discord and evil practice, 
justifying only too accurately the strictures of 
the Church. It obeyed with something like 
relief the order of the civil authorities in 1 767 
to hold no further meetings, and remained 
quiescent till the Comte de Clermont's death 
in 1 771. Jn this year it was proposed to re- 
form its organisation thoroughly. Emissaries 
were sent into all parts of France to take count 
of the situation, and to prepare reports for the 

25 



Secret Societies 



central committee. In consequence of these 
reports it was decided that the association 
should be reorganised on a more democratic 
basis, every office being made annually elective. 
The Due de Chartres was chosen as Grand 
Master, and the Due de Luxembourg as general 
administrator. As the Due de Chartres did 
not at once accept the Grand Mastership, he 
never in point of action was Grand Master of 
the *' Loge de France/* though in 1773 lan 
assembly met, which, after confirming the 
elections of 1771, installed him with great 
solemnity in his office as head of the '^ Grand 
Orient." The meeting convened for this 
occasion at Folie-Titon, a " maison de plais- 
ance," constituted the parliament of masonry, 
though not all the lodges consented to send 
representatives to it. 

" Le Grand Orient n'est plus qu'un corps 
forme par la reunion des representants libres 
de toutes les loges: ce sont les loges elles- 
m^mes, ce sont tous les masons membres de 
ces loges, qui par la voie de leurs repr6sentants 
donnent les lois ; qui les font observer d*une 
part et qui les observent de Fautre. Nul 

26 



and the French Revolution 

n'obeit qu'a la loi qu'il s'est imposee lui-meme. 
C'est le plus libre, le plus juste, le plus naturel, 
et par consequent le plus parfait des gouvernc- 
ments."* 

The council of the new organisation sat in 
the former Jesuit novitiate of the rue Pot de 
Fer, and worked with increasing power and 
industry until the outbreak of the Revolution 
that was to realise their ideals. A section of 
the "Grande Loge de France" refused to obey 
the " Grand Orient/* and continued to operate 
independently. The "Empereurs d'Orient et 
d'Occident " and the " Chevaliers d'Orient " 
also worked separately, nor would they take 
part in the amalgamation. Later on, however, 
great changes took place in masonic opinion, 
while bonds of common interest drew together 
lodges that would, without the political interest, 
always have been divided. 

Not only was France the home of many 
masonic lodges, but its social system was riddled 
with mystical societies which gathered their 
initiates from among the adepts of masonic 
grades, and owned allegiance to no supreme 
* " Une Loge Ma9onnique d'avant 1789," p. 29. 
27 



Secret Societies 



council. Swedenborg and Martinez de Pasqually 
always regarded masonry as a school of in- 
struction, and considered it the elementary and 
inferior step that led to the higher mysteries. 
In consequence of their teaching it came about 
that a great number of sects and rites were 
instituted in all parts of Europe, whose unity 
consisted in a common masonic initiation, but 
whose aims, doctrines, and practices were often 
irreconcilable. The Martinezists, or followers 
of Martinez de Pasqually, were a distinctively 
French sect; they had lodges in Paris in 1754, 
and also at Toulouse, Poitiers, Marseilles, and 
other places. The term " Illuminates " is ap- 
plied to them equally with the Swedenborgians, 
Martinists, and several germane societies. 

Pasqually is said to have been a Rosicrucian 
adept. His teaching was theurgic and moral, and 
his avowed object was to develop the somnolent 
divine faculties in humanity, and to lead man 
to enter into communication with the invisible, 
by means of ''La Chose," the enigmatic name 
he gave to the highest secret. He is chiefly 
interesting as having been the first to permeate 
the higher grades of French masonry with 
illuminism, an example followed afterwards 

28 



and the French Revolution 

with conspicuous success by the disciples of 
Weishaupt. When Pasqually died in Haiti his 
teaching was taken up by Willermooz, a Lyonese 
merchant, also by the celebrated Louis Claude 
de Saint-Martin. Saint-Martin absorbed and 
developed his master's teaching in a peculiar and 
personal manner, and through his philosophy 
became an important influence on then current 
affairs. He had been an officer in the regiment 
of Foix at Bordeaux when he first became 
acquainted with Pasqually, and soon after 
meeting him he threw up his commission in 
the army with the object of devoting his life 
to meditation, and the study of Jacob Boehme. 
He became the mystical philosopher of the 
Revolution, and the book he published in 1775, 
" Des Erreurs et de la Verite," produced an im- 
mense sensation, comparable to that created by 
the publication of " La Profession de Foi d'un 
Vicaire Savoyard." Like Rousseau, he believed 
in the infinite possibilities of man, holding that 
Providence had planted a religion in man's 
heart "which could not be contaminated by 
priestly traffic, nor tainted by imposture." 
Rousseau gave the name of conscience to " the 
innate principle of justice and virtue which, 

29 



Secret Societies 



independently of experience and in spite of 
ourselves, forms the basis of our judgments " ; 
Saint-Martin thought it the divine instinct. 
On the belief in man's essential goodness both 
founded their demand for social revolution, 
claiming an opportunity for men to be indeed 
men and not slaves, a chance for climbing back 
to that old God-designed level of happiness 
from which they had descended. Saint-Martin 
saw in such a movement the awakening of men 
from the sleep of death, and with deep con- 
viction he responded to the cry " All men are 
priests," uttered three centuries earlier by 
Luther, with the cry " All men are kings ! " 
The answer to the social enigmas of the century 
was whispered by him in the ** ternaire sacre " 
of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity ; and it echoed 
with reverberating clangor through all the 
lodges of France. Martinist societies were 
everywhere founded to study the doctrines 
contained in his book, and to expound the 
teachings of the mystical philosopher who, 
like Lamartine in a later day, contemplated 
the Revolution as Christianity applied to 
politics. 

A volume might easily be written upon the 
30 



and the French Revolution 

lodges and rites in France during this time ; 
and their very number makes choice of those 
deserving peculiar mention bewildering. The 
well-known "Loge des Amis Reunis," or 
" Philalethes," inaugurated by " the man of 
all conspiracies," Savalette de Lange, and his 
friends, carried on an important correspondence 
with lodges in every quarter of Europe. Under 
the pretext of pleasant gatherings and luxurious 
dinners these " friends of truth " prosecuted 
the dark and dangerous work of preparing 
that reformation of society which in practice 
became Revolution. One of the most famous, 
if not the most interesting, of the intellectual 
lodges, was that of the " Neuf Soeurs " in Paris, 
founded in memory of Helvetius, which, if it 
held a secret, held the secret of Voltaire, 
" Humanity and Tolerance." It was intended 
to be an encyclopaedic workshop, a complement 
to the already existing Lodge of Sciences. 
Since all the secondary education in France was 
in the hands of a clerical corporation, and the 
Sorbonne was dedicated to theology, the *' Neuf 
Soeurs " organised * " la Societe Apollonienne." 
This society arranged for courses of lectures 

* November 17, 1780. 
31 



Secret Societies 



to be given by its more eminent members ; 
Marmontel and Garat, for example, lectured 
on history, La Harpe on literature, Condorcet 
and De la Croix on chemistry, Fourcroy and 
Sue on anatomy and physiology. The impro- 
vised college did not shut its doors during the 
Revolution, but changed its name to " Lycee 
Republicain." Its professors conformed to 
Republican usages, and La Harpe was to be 
seen lecturing in a red cap. 

Some useful institutions seem to have been 
evolved out of the conclaves of the ^' Neut 
Soeurs," including the reformed laws of criminal 
procedure embodied in the Code Napoleon.* 
The Due de la Rochefoucauld, translator of the 
American Constitution, was an associate of the 
lodge, so was Forster, who sailed round the world 
with Captain Cook; Brissot, who was later 
condemned as leader of the Girondins, Camille 
Desmoulins, Fauchet, Romme, Bailly, Rabaud 
Saint Etienne, Danton, Andre Chenier, Dom 
Gerle, Paul Jones, Franklin, Guillotin, Cabanis, 
Petion, Sieves, Cerutti, Hanna, and Voltaire. 
Together they form an illustrious company 
who, all in their varying ways, took con- 
* " Une Loge Ma9onnique d'avant 1789," p. 243, 
32 



1 



and the French Revolution 

spicuous shares in the work of reformation. 
Commemorative assemblies and processions were 
organised by this lodge on the occasions of the 
deaths of Franklin, Voltaire, and Paul Jones, 
the liberators. The lodge has received historic 
consecration at the hands of Louis Blanc, Henri 
Martin, and Amiable. Having accomplished a 
great work, it disappeared, like all the other 
lodges, at the opening of the Revolution. 

The share that women took in promoting 
social changes has not received the attention it 
deserves. Readers of Dumas are familiar with 
the fact that in country districts fraternal 
societies welcoming members of both sexes met 
regularly in barns and farms ; but it does not 
seem to be usually recognised that apart from 
the "Loges de la Felicite," which had been the 
occasion of frequent scandal, many regular and 
well-conducted "lodges of adoption*' for 
women were recognised by the " Grand Orient." 
The Duchess de Bourbon, Egalite's sister, was 
Grand Mistress of the adoptive lodge of "la 
Candeur " in 1775, and Princesse de Lamballe 
and Madame de Genlis also wielded the hammer. 
The work of these fashionable dames cannot, 
however, be taken seriously. It was a pastime 

33 c 



Secret Societies 



for them, just as were the decorous fetes held 
within the lodges in which both men and women 
participated. The entertainments were elegant 
and refined, often taking the form of the illus- 
tration of a virtue such as benevolence, or of 
homage to some humanitarian quality. For 
example, one day a lady discovered that a poor 
working woman with nine children had added 
to her burdens by adopting the orphan of a 
friend. The ladies of her lodge were enthu- 
siastic at such generosity, and caused the poor 
woman to be exhibited at one of their reunions 
in a tableau surrounded by the ten children. 
After considerable acclamation she was allowed 
to go her way with clothes and money presented 
by her admirers. " Bienfaisance " was a par- 
ticularly fashionable virtue. Women of society 
raised altars in their rooms dedicated to this 
quality. The tone of society, however, was not 
wholly sentimental ; it was also reasonable, and 
it became the vogue for ladies to attend scientific 
lectures ; classes in drawing-rooms on minera- 
logy, chemistry, and physics were well attended ; 
ladies were no longer painted as goddesses, but 
as students, in laboratories, surrounded by tele- 
scopes and retorts ; Countess Voyer attended 

34 



and the French Revolution 

dissections, and one of her friends wielded the 
scalpel with grace ; Madame de Genlis, whose 
self-satisfaction is almost priggish, alludes in her 
memoirs to the intense pleasure she derived 
from some geological lectures. 

While the world of fashion was playing with 
science and masonry, the opinions and beliefs of 
its social inferiors were gradually crystallising 
into action. Serious women of the bourgeoisie 
and farmer classes attended meetings and dis- 
cussions and taught their sons and their husbands 
what it meant to fight for an ideal ; and how 
the ternaire sacre could be translated into fact. 

At the lowest computation there were seven 
hundred lodges in France before the Revolution, 
and a very large proportion of them had 
acknowledged '' lodges of adoption " for 
women. It is impossible from the material 
published on the subject, however, to form 
even an approximate estimate of the number 
of members of either sex belonging to these 
associations. It was very large, but the claim 
to a million adherents made by the '^ Loge de 
la Candeur" in 1785 is clearly greatly in excess 
of actual fact. At Bayonne '^ La Zelee," at 
Angers the " Tendre Accueil," at Saint-Malo 

35 



Secret Societies 



the '* Triple Esperance/' at Rheims the " Triple 
Union," at Tours the " Amis de la Vertu " 
flourished. Poignant satires on credulity were 
delivered at the " Loge de la Parfaite Intelli- 
gence " at Liege to which the Prince Bishop and 
the greater part of his chapter belonged, and of 
which all the office-bearers were dignitaries of 
the Church. The system seems to have per- 
meated every section of French national life. 

Pernetti, a Benedictine, librarian of Frederick 
the Great, had founded a Swedenborgian brother- 
hood at Avignon, in company with a Polish 
noble Gabrionka, who by some is supposed to 
have been Cagliostro, and Pernetti is but an ex- 
ample of dozens of other missionaries. Every- 
where gatherings and associations existed, 
separated by rites and by practices, but united in 
intention by their common love for and faith in 
the creed of brotherhood. 

One thing only was needed to transform this 
heterogeneous collection of lodges, sects, and 
rites into a powerful political lever upon society, 
and that was a mind which could devise a 
common course of action or a common political 
understanding to unite them. Secret idealistic 
societies had done a wonderful work in fostering 

36 



and the French Revolution 

principles and hopes and ideals, but in order to 
become effective in action transmutation of some 
kind was necessary. 

Masonic writers have of late made but little 
allusion to the influence of the German ^' illu- 
minates " on the French lodges, and are disposed 
to detract from the reputation of the marvellous 
organiser Weishaupt, Professor of Canon Law at 
the University of Ingoldstadt. Barruel, Louis 
Blanc, and Deschamps unite, however, in regard- 
ing him as the most profound of conspirators. 
Le Couteulx de Canteleu considers the young 
professor of Ingolstadt as the originator of a 
remarkable system, of which Von Knigge was 
the most able missionary. With Weishaupt 
alone lay the credit not only of realising the 
cause of the ineffectiveness of societies upon 
society, but of elaborating an homogeneous 
scheme which was destined to embrace and 
eventually absorb all lodges and all rites. He 
was no freemason when he invented his design, 
but in order to study masonic methods he was 
received as a mason in Munich, where one Zwack, 
a legal member of the lodge, afterwards one of 
Weishaupt's confederates, sold him the ultimate 
secrets of masonry. Equipped with this know- 

37 



Secret Societies 



ledge he allied himself with Von Knigge of the 
" Strict Observance," and caused all his own 
disciples to become masons. " Every secret 
engagement is a source of enthusiasm," said 
Weishaupt ; "it is useless to seek for the 
reasons ; the fact exists, that is enough." In 
conformity with this belief he recruited the new 
secret society which he intended should absorb 
all the others. 

In 1776 the order of the Perfectibilists was 
founded. They began by creating a new world, 
for they purposed to work independently of 
existing conditions. They invented their own 
calandar, with new divisions of time and new 
names for days and periods ; they took unto 
themselves the appellations of Greece and Rome. 
Weishaupt became Spartacus, after the leader of 
the servile insurrection in the time of Pompey ; 
Von Knigge became Philo ; Zwack, Cato ; 
Costanzo, Diomedes ; Nicolai, Lucian. The 
map of Europe was re-named ; in their corre- 
spondence Munich was Athens; Austria Egypt ; 
and France Illyria. The organisation of the 
Perfectibilists was designed to enlist all pro- 
fessions and both sexes. It consisted of two 
large classes, that of "preparations" and that 

38 



and the French Revolution 

of ** mysteries.'* In the former there were four 
grades : novice, minerval, illuminate minor, 
and illuminate major. In the latter there were 
also four grades : priest, regent, philosopher, 
and man-king. There was also a " plant- 
nursery '' for children, and a class in which 
women were trained to influence men. The 
associates who possessed the full confidence of 
Weishaupt were called Areopagites. 

The order was designed as the directing 
instrument of that social revolution which 
Weishaupt and many others knew to be immi- 
nent. France was the country selected for the 
great experiment, and Weishaupt faced with 
courage the problem that students of social 
questions realised in the latter half of the 
eighteenth century would be the difficulty in 
any revolution. He saw like them that the 
future class struggle for survival and supremacy 
in France would lie between the bourgeoisie and 
the people, that the nobles would count for 
nothing in the contest. He knew that the 
commercial classes were extremely rich, that in 
so far as the actual administrative work went 
it was in the hands of the third estate, that in 
the event of revolution it would become the 

39 



Secret Societies 



first and perhaps the only power in the country. 
A consideration of the representative institutions 
of France before the Revolution convinces us 
of the fact that the actual people were unre- 
presented, and moreover that it was unlikely 
that they would ever have a voice in the 
management of affairs, unless their claims 
were enforced by well organised and wide 
reaching secret societies. Weishaupt's scheme 
was intended to prevent the bourgeoisie reaping 
all the revolutionary harvest. As a disciple of 
Rousseau he did not favour the establishment of 
commercial supremacy as a substitute for the old 
system of autocracy. " Salvation does not lie 
where shining thrones are defended by swords, 
where the smoke of the censors ascends to 
heaven, or where thousands of starving men 
pace the rich fields of harvest. The revolution 
which is about to break upon us will be sterile if 
it is not complete.'* He feared that the conces- 
sions of kings, and the removal of food taxes, 
might delude the people into the belief that all 
was well, and he imparted his fear to his disciples. 
His object in establishing the Perfectibilists was 
the literal realisation of Rousseau's theories. 
He dreamt of and schemed for a day when the 

40 



and the French Revolution 

abolition of property, social authority, and 
nationality would be facts, when human beings 
would return to that happy state in which they 
form but one family.* Being an ex- Jesuit and 
acquainted with the organisation of that order, he 
determined to adapt its system to his own scheme, 
to make as it were a counter-society of Jesus. 
All the maxims and rules of Jesuit adminis- 
tration were to be pushed further and applied 
more rigorously than had been contemplated 
by their inventors. Passive obedience, universal 
espionage, and all the dialectic of casuistry were 
his chosen tools, and so successful was the 
undertaking that in four years a system of 
communication and information with every part 
of Europe had been established. The unseen 
hands of the society were in all affairs, its ears 
in the cabinets of princes and cardinals. The 
Church was regarded unrelentingly as a foe, for 
the Perfectibilists were the enemies of institu- 
tional Christianity, and represented themselves 
as professors of the purest Christian Socialism. 
Weishaupt classed the theological and sacerdotal 
systems among the worst enemies of man, and 
in his instructions to his disciples urged that 
* Letter of Spartacus to Cato, p. i6o. Robison. 
41 



Secret Societies 



they should be contended with as definite evils. 
And the Church feared him, for did he not 
declare that men were still slaves because they 
still knelt ? Did he not command the people 
to rise from their knees ? Abbe Deschamps, 
in *'Les societes secretes et la societe/* expresses 
his dread of the machinations of so terrible an 
Order, and points out that "once dechristianised 
the masses will claim absolute equality and the 
right to enjoy life ! " 

Weishaupt, on the other hand, said : " He 
who would work for the happiness of the human 
race, for the contentment and peace of man, for 
the diminishing of discontent, should examine 
and then enfeeble the principles which trouble 
that peace, that content, that happiness. Of 
this class are all systems which are opposed to 
the ennobling and perfecting of human nature ; 
all systems which unnecessarily multiply the 
evils of the world, and represent them as greater 
than they really are ; all systems which depre- 
ciate the merit and the dignity of man, which 
diminish his confidence in his own natural 
forces, which decry human reason, and so open 
the way for imposture." 

The candidate for the grade of epopt, or 
42 



and the French Revolution 

priest, among the Perfectibilists was, before his 
initiation into the higher mysteries, introduced 
into a hall, wherin stood a magnificent dais sur- 
mounted by a throne. In front of the throne 
stood a table laden with jewels, gold coins, a 
sceptre, crown, and sword. " ' Look,' said the 
epopt chief, ' if this crown and sceptre, monu- 
ments of human degradation and imbecility, 
tempt thee ; if thy heart is with them ; if thou 
wouldst help kings to oppress men, we will 
place thee as near a throne as thou desirest ; 
but our sanctuary will be closed to thee, and we 
shall abandon thee for ever to thy folly. If, 
on the contrary, thou art willing to devote 
thyself to making men happy and free, be 
welcome here. . . . Decide ! ' " 

After decision the would-be initiate had to 
make a frank and detailed confession of all the 
actions of his life. Weishaupt thought this a 
very important preliminary to higher know- 
ledge, because it gave him cognisance of personal 
secrets which would make betrayal of the order 
on the part of the novice dangerous and often 
impossible. The verification of the confession 
was proceeded with in a dark room, decorated 
with symbols and emblems of mystery. A 

43 



Secret Societies 



book called the " Code Scrutateur " was opened, 
and all the faults of the candidate, his hates, 
loves, confidences, and fears were read out loud. 
These had been extracted from the unconscious 
victim, or from his friends, by the " insinuating 
brethren," whose business it was to find out 
everything about every member of their society. 
When all this was over a curtain was drawn 
aside, revealing an altar surmounted by a large 
crucifix. The candidate was tonsured, vested 
with sacerdotal garments, and given the red 
Phrygian cap of the epopt, with these words : 
"Wear this cap; it means more than the 
crown of kings" — a prophecy verified by the 
Revolution. 

In the lower grades of Illuminism recruits 
had no knowledge of such ceremonies. They 
were allowed to think that they were supporting 
orthodox Christianity and old authorities, and 
in this way time was gained for studying the 
character of recruits, and unsuitable members 
were weeded out. Later on, as they gradually 
climbed the ladder of initiation, it was revealed 
to them that Jesus had come to teach men 
reasonableness and not superstition, and that 
His only precepts were love of God and love 

44 



and the French Revolution 

of humanity. Camille Desmoulins invoked the 
'^ Sans-culotte Jesus " during the Revolution, 
claiming Him as the pattern Socialist. Jesus, 
the Illuminists said, came to dissipate prejudice, 
to spread light and wise morality, to show 
men how to govern themselves. He was the 
true liberator of man, and the teacher of 
equality and liberty. 

It has been argued with some plausibility that 
since such harmless and conservative people as 
the Duke of Sachs-Gotha and Prince August of 
Sachs- Weimar were illuminates, Louis XVI. and 
Frederick the Great masons, the secret societies 
could have had no direct influence on the social 
upheaval, and therefore are not worthy of the 
serious consideration of the historian. The 
study of the organisation of the great secret 
service reveals the reason of this contention and 
also its futility. The lower grades of masonry 
and Illuminism served a double-edged purpose : 
that of conceaHng the existence of the higher 
grades, and that of proving the worthiness of 
earnest searchers after social regeneration to enter 
those higher grades. Mystery of any kind 
always attracts the weak-minded, and Illuminism 
allured many dupes whom it was necessary to 

45 



Secret Societies 



keep at arm's length from realities. The exist- 
ence of serious purpose had also studiously to 
be concealed from royalties and prelates, for 
hierarchical religion is dear to all supporters 
of autocracy. Yet it was politic to lull the 
suspicions of the conservative and governing 
classes by admitting them with apparent freedom 
and joy into the Order. It was a policy of dis- 
armament, and V/eishaupt was quite candid as 
to this, for anything was better for the cause 
than open enmity. 

" If it is to our interest to have the ordinary 
schools on our side, it is also very important to 
win over the ecclesiastical seminaries and their 
superiors ; for in that way we should secure the 
best part of the country, and disarm the greatest 
enemies of all innovation ; and what is still 
better, in winning the ecclesiastics, we should 
have the people in our hands.'* 

To many Perfectibilists, illuminism and 
masonry were but charming social amusements, 
signifying nothing. The doctrines of social 
subversion, the creeds and dogmas of sudden 
death, all seemed but quaint and often crude 
allegories ; assemblies were but the occasion of 

46 



and the French Revolution 

fun and feasting ; men played at the comedy of 
equality with zest and good temper, just because 
it was all so impossible and unlike life. And 
may not autocrats like Frederick the Great and 
the Emperor of Austria have blindly served the 
enterprise of the peopl'e and have assisted in 
converting their own comedy into tragedy ? 

Recruits for the secret service were not diffi- 
cult to attract. The Lisbon earthquake had 
unsettled many minds. The theurgists Saint- 
Germain and Cagliostro flitted hither and thither 
like brilliant Oriental birds against the neutral 
background of a Europe at peace but in travail. 
Eagerly watched and eagerly worshipped, they 
performed miracles and cures that dazzled the 
imagination. Their magical shows, displaying 
sometimes conspicuous charlatanry, amazed the 
gaping crowds, and served to disguise their 
primary mission from the Courts and the 
governing classes. 

People of all classes became nervous and dis- 
turbed. Suzanne Labrousse of Perigord,* being 
in chapel, threw herself at the foot of the Cru- 
cifix and announced precisely the date of the 
convocation of the States-General. The Queen 
* 1784. 
47 



Secret Societies 



of Prussia and her waiting-women had seen '' the 
white lady." Crowds in the market-place of 
Leipzig awaited the ghost of wonder-working 
Schroepfer, who had shown Louis XV. in a 
magic mirror his successor decapitated ; for had 
he not promised to reappear to his disciples at 
a given moment after death ? Interpretations 
of the Apocalypse were published, and it was 
asserted that yet more ancient prophecies were 
about to be fulfilled. Men asked themselves 
as they met in their lodges and their homes, 
or as they sat round the pool of Mesmer, or 
consulted Cazotte, *' What would be the end 
thereof?'* Great changes were in the air; 
men felt the fluttering of unseen wings and the 
breath of unrecognised forces, their expecta- 
tions kept them restless and eager. 

One mind at least in France was able to con- 
template with calmness the weaving of strange 
threads into the texture of society ; and in that 
mind was clearly reflected the spirit and ten- 
dency of the agitated world of action. Undis- 
mayed by portent or prophecy, the unknown 
philosopher meditated as he watched the shuttles 
darting through the giant loom of the social 
system, and gazed on that living tissue through 

48 



and the French Revolution 

which in the weaving " shimmered unceasingly 
the irrefragable justice of God." Saint-Martin 
had already formulated that ternaire sacr^ which 
many were diligently and in different ways seek- 
ing to attain. Men grasped eagerly after the 
fruit of the travail of his soul and were satisfied. 
By studying his doctrines their apprehension was 
quickened and their eiForts enhanced and spiri- 
tualised. To a great extent he transfused the 
masonic thought with that faith which makes 
the movement of mountains no impossibility. 
The ternaire which proved the miraculous seed- 
corn of the revolutionary harvest had been 
scattered by him broadcast over the land to 
germinate in the furrows of France against the 
reaping-time. 

Meanwhile the ambassadors of Weishaupt 
surveyed the countries which were to be the stage 
of the great drama. Long before accredited 
Illuminist agents were sent to instruct the lodges 
of the Grand Orient, inaugural work seems to 
have been undertaken by Cagliostro and Saint- 
Germain. Weishaupt was too shrewd an 
organiser to neglect any instrument of advan- 
tage, and, estimating justly the credulity of 
the day, he saw the extreme importance of 

49 » 



Secret Societies 



securing such men as the magicians for the 
furtherance of his purpose. 

One of his emissaries, Cagliostro, was known 
all over Europe as the " Priest of Mystery," 
and nearly every one, however sceptical of his 
powers, fell before his personal charm. The 
Perfectibilists annexed him and initiated him into 
their ritual, as he himself describes, in an under- 
ground cave near Frankfort-on-the-Main. At 
the initiation he learnt that the first blows of the 
Illuminates would be aimed at France, and that 
after the fall of that monarchy the Church herself 
would be assailed. After receiving instructions 
and money from Weishaupt (a secret which he is 
said later to have confessed to the Inquisition), 
he proceeded to Strasburg, and there led a life 
of philanthropy, giving to the poor his money, 
to the rich his advice, to the sick his help. He 
was veritably adored by the people. When he 
went to Paris in 1781 his elegant house in the 
Rue Saint Claude was soon besieged by admirers. 
His portrait was in great request on medallions 
and fans, and his bust in marble and in bronze 
figured in the houses of the great with this in- 
scription : "Le divin Cagliostro." He received 
his clients in a large room furnished with Oriental 

SO 



and the French Revolution 

luxury, which contained the bust of Hippocrates, 
the " Universal Prayer " of Pope, together with 
objects of necromantic design and thaumaturgic 
virtue. His mysterious device L.P.D. {Itlia 
pedibus destrue) was reputed to be full of sinister 
meaning for the kings of France. Marie 
Antoinette was deeply interested in matters and 
men of this nature. De Rohan entertained her 
with tales of Cagliostro; she consulted Saint- 
Germain, and was one of the visitors who clus- 
tered round the mysterious fluid of the hypnotic 
doctor Mesmer, which was calculated to heal 
all ills, and who listened to his dictum, " There 
is but one health, one illness, and one remedy." 
Though Mesmer's experiments were rejected 
by the French savants of the day as worthless, 
they were eagerly taken up in other parts of 
Europe. Mesmer enforced the law of mutual 
dependence and of unity in the natural world, 
as Saint-Martin enforced the laws of mutual 
dependence and of unity in the spiritual world. 
It might well have been Saint-Martin and not 
Mesmer who said, " that the life of man is part 
of the universal movement," for they were 
both exponents ot the truth of the solidarity of 
the race. 

51* 



Secret Societies 



The Comte de Saint-Germain, another of 
Weishaupt's ambassadors, emerges at intervals 
upon the surface of affairs a brilliant and accom- 
plished personage, and sinks again to work in 
the great secret service, or to sit, as tradition 
has it, upon his golden altar in an attitude 
of Oriental absorption. Saint-Germain was 
probably not only the secret missionary and 
entertainer of Louis XV., but also the agent of 
masonic and other societies working for the 
regeneration of humanity ; one life was probably 
only the cloak for the other. 

At the great Convention of Masonry held at 
Wilhelmsbad in 1782 the Order of the Strict 
Observance was suspended, and Von Knigge 
disclosed the scheme of Weishaupt to the 
assembled representatives of the masonic and 
mystical fraternities. Then and there disciples 
of Saint- Martin and of Willermooz, as well 
as statesmen, scientists, magicians, and magis- 
trates from all countries, were converted to 
lUuminism. Perfectibilist doctrines percolated 
everywhere through the lodges of Europe, and 
when the " Philalethes," at the instigation 
of Mirabeau, became the missionary agents 
of lUuminism, they preached to already half- 

52 



and the French Revolution 

converted audiences. The fact that Mirabeau 
had any connection with such schemes has been 
occasionally |^enied, partly on account of the 
bitter pamphlet he launched against Cagliostro 
and partly because in ** La Monarchie Prus- 
sienne " he denounced all secret societies and 
asserted that they should be tolerated by no 
State. This proves no more than the work 
which Nicolai produced explaining that secret 
societies existed for no other purpose than to 
serve the Stuart cause, when all the while he was 
founding a club and gaining possession of news- 
papers, like the ** Berlin Journal " and the *' Jena 
Gazette," to further the views of the initiates. 
It must be remembered that everything that 
conduced to the welfare of the society and the 
furtherance of the mission was justifiable, and 
that by subterfuges such as these Mirabeau and 
Nicolai sought to avert suspicion from them- 
selves, and to obtain peace to work with greater 
efficiency and freedom. Mirabeau, owing to his 
friendship with Nicolai while in Berlin, is said to 
have been initiated into the last mysteries of the 
Perfectibilists at Brunswick. On returning to 
Paris he, together with Bonneville, introduced 
the German doctrines at the lodge of the " Amis 

53 



Secret Societies 



Reunis."* Among his auditors were the Duke of 
Orleans, Brissot, Condorcet, Savalette, Gregoire, 
Garat, Petion, Baboeuf, Barnave, Sieyes, Saint- 
Just, Camille Desmoulins, Hebert, Santerre, 
Danton, Marat, Chenier, and many other men 
whose names are immortalised in the annals of 
the Revolution. The charge of actually dissemi- 
nating the doctrines throughout France was 
given to Bode (Aurelius) and Busch (Bayard). 
So well did the Perfectibilist missionaries work 
that by 1788 every lodge under the Grand 
Orient — and they numbered in that year 629 — 
is said to have been indoctrinated with the 
system of Weishaupt. 

From the time or the inoculation of the 
Grand Orient of France with the German 
doctrines, masonry, from being a simple instru- 
ment of tolerance, humanity, and fraternity, 
acting in a vague and general manner on the 
sentiments of its adherents, became a direct 
instrument of social transformation. Plans of 
the most practical nature were discussed. A 
scheme for recruiting a citizen army was drawn 
up, and Savalette de Lange, of the royal 
household, is said to have been responsible for 
* " Le Couteulx de Canteleu," p. 168. 
54 



and the French Revolution 

its execution. At the opening of the Revolution 
he appeared before the municipal councillors 
of Paris, followed by a few men crying, " Let 
us save the country," thereby exciting no little 
emulation. '^ Messieurs," he said : 

" Voici des citoyens que j'ai exerces a 
manier les armes pour la defense de la patrie ; 
je me suis point fait leur majeur ou leur 
general, nous sommes tous egaux, je suis 
simplement caporal, mais j'ai donn6 I'exemple ; 
ordonnez que tous les citoyens le suivent, 
que la nation prenne les armes, et la liberte est 
invincible."* 

The next day the army of the ** gardes 
nationaux " was formed. Barruel relates that 
at the outbreak of the Revolution two million 
hands, holding pikes, torches and hatchets, 
were ready to serve the cause of humanity, and 
that this body of zealots had been created by 
the adepts. Whether this be a true estimate 
or not, many an arm which was ready in 1789 
to strike a blow for liberty had been nerved by 
the teachings of the secret societies. 

Nearly all the masonic and illuminist lodges 
* " Le Couteulx de Canteleu," p. 211. 
55 



Secret Societies 



shrank to their smallest esoteric dimensions in 
1789, and expanded exoterically as clubs and 
popular societies. La Loge des Neuf Soeurs, 
for example, became *' La Societe Nationale des 
Neuf Soeurs," a club admitting women. The 
Grand Orient ceased its direction of affairs. 
The old theoretical discussions within the 
lodges as to how the Revolution should be 
conducted, produced in action the widest diver- 
gences, and Jacobins, Girondins, Hebertists, 
Dantonists, Robespierrists, in consequence de- 
stroyed each other. 

It has been the habit for so long to regard 
the Revolution as an undefined catastrophe 
that it is hardly possible to persuade men that 
at least some foreknowledge of its course and 
destination existed in the mind of the lUu- 
minists. When Cagliostro wrote his celebrated 
letter from England in 1787 predicting for 
the French people the realisation of the 
schemes of the secret societies ; foretelling the 
Revolution and the destruction of the Bastille and 
monarchy ; the advent of a Prince Egalite, who 
would abolish lettres de cachet ; the convocation 
of the States-General ; the destruction of eccle- 
siasticism and the substitution of the religion of 

56 



and the French Revolution 

Reason; he probably wrote of the things he had 
heard debated in the lodges of Paris. Prescience 
might also explain the remark attributed to 
Mirabeau, " Voila la victime," as he indicated 
the King at the opening of the States-General 
at Versailles.* Two volumes of addresses, de- 
livered at various lodges by eminent masons, 
prove how truly the situation had been gauged 
by Condorcet and Mirabeau. In fantastic 
phraseology the philosopher announced at Stras- 
bourg that in France the " idolatry of monarchy 
had received a death-blow from the daughters 
of the Order of the Templars," while the states- 
man uttered in the recesses of the lodge of the 
" Chevaliers Bienfaisants " in Paris, the levelling 
principles and liberal ideas which he afterwards 
thundered from the tribune of the Assembly.! 
The path to the overthrow of religious autho- 
rity had to a great extent been made smooth 
by the distribution, through the lodges, of 
Boulanger's ^'Origines du Despotisme Oriental," 
in which religion is treated as the engine of the 
State and the source of despotic power. " Des 
Erreurs et de la Verite," springing as it did out 

* " Memoires de Weber," vol. i. chap, ix, p. 335. 
t p. 41. Robison. 

57 



Secret Societies 



of the self-consciousness of the philosopher of 
the Revolution, represents, more than any other 
book, the feeling of the mystical aspirants after 
a reign of brotherhood and love. It became 
the Talmud of such people and the classic 
whence they drew their opinions. Religions ? 
their very diversity condemns them. Govern- 
ments ? their instability, their foolish ways prove 
how false is the base on which they rest. All 
is wrong, especially criminal law, for it upholds 
the monstrous injustice of not only killing guilt 
but also repentance. Saint-Martin spoke to 
eager ears when he spoke thus to men, men 
willing to believe that man alone has created 
evil, that God at least must be exonerated from 
so monstrous a charge, men willing to work 
for that reign of brotherhood which meant the 
restoration of man's lost happiness. A very 
curious symbol is preserved in the National 
Library in Paris which illustrates the decline of 
the sentiment and principle and faith wherein 
the Revolution originated. It consists of a 
medal struck under the Convention in which 
two men regard each other without demon- 
stration of affection, and all around runs 
the inscription : " Sois mon frere ou je te 

58 



and the French Revolution 

tue." The doctrine of brotherhood can no 
further go. 

After considering presently available materials 
we must conclude that at the lowest estimate a 
co-ordinated working basis of ideas had been 
established through the agency of the lodges of 
France ; that thousands of men, unable to form 
a political opinion or judgment for themselves, 
had been awakened to a sense of their own 
responsibility and their own power in further- 
ing the great movement towards a new order of 
affairs. It remains to the eternal credit of the 
workers in the great secret service to have 
elicited a vigorous personal response to the 
call of great ideals, and to have directed the 
enthusiasm excited to the welfare, not of in- 
dividuals, but of society as a whole. The 
conjectural realm of the inception of political 
ideas is a morass into which few historians care 
to venture. Proved paths are lacking, the 
country is dark and unmapped, and a false step 
may ruin the reputation of years. It is to 
be hoped that one day a contribution to the 
spiritual history of the eighteenth century will 
be made which will neither ignore the Utopian 
confederacies nor attribute to them, as is the 

59 



Secret Societies 



habit of ecclesiastics, influences altogether 
malign. 

At the great Revolution the doctrines of the 
lodges were at last translated from the silent 
world of secrecy to the common world of 
practice; a few months sufficed to depose 
ecclesiasticism from its pedestal and monarchy 
from its throne ; to make the army republican, 
and the word of Rousseau law. The half- 
mystical phantasies of the lodges became the 
habits of daily life. The Phrygian cap of 
the "illuminate" became the headgear of the 
populace, and the adoption of the classic appel- 
lations used by Spartacus and his Areopagites 
the earnest of good citizenship. Past time 
was broken with, and a calendar modelled on 
those in use among the secret confederates 
became the symbol of the new epoch. The 
ternaire — Liberty, Equality, Fraternity — in- 
stead of merely adorning the meeting-places 
of masonic bodies, was stencilled on all the 
public buildings of France ; and the red banner 
which had symbolised universal love within the 
lodges was carried by the ragged battalions of 
the people on errands of pillage and destruction. 

The great subversive work had been silently 
60 



and the French Revolution 

and ruthlessly accomplished in the face of popes 
and kings. Though the Church spread the 
report that Illuminates worshipped a devil, and 
named it Christ, and denounced masonry as the 
" mystery of iniquity " ; though Saint-Germain 
and Saint- Martin were decried by the Jesuits ; 
though Cagliostro died in the Inquisitors' 
prison of Sant'Angelo, and Cazotte, Egalite, 
and many another agent of the secret service 
were guillotined ; though Weishaupt was perse- 
cuted and the German Perfectibilists suppressed ; 
yet the mine which had been dug under altar 
and throne was too deep to be filled up by 
either persecution or calumny. 

The true history of the eighteenth century 
is the history of the aspiration of the human 
race. In France it was epitomised. The 
spiritual life of that nation, which was to lift 
the weight of material oppression from the 
shoulders of multitudes, had been cherished 
through dark years by the preachers of Free- 
dom, Equality, and Brotherhood. From the 
Swedenborgian stronghold of Avignon, from 
Martinist Lyons, from Narbonne, from Munich, 
and many another citadel of freedom, there 
flashed on the grey night of feudalism, unseen 

6i 



Secret Societies 



but to the initiates, the watch-fires of great 
hope tended by those priests of progress who, 
though unable to lift the veil that shrouds the 
destiny of man and the end of worlds, by faith 
were empowered to dedicate the future to the 
Unknown God. 



62 



THE COMTE DE 
SAINT-GERMAIN 



THE COMTE DE 
SAINT-GERMAIN 



THE lives of notable people do not often 
baffle biographers by their mystery, yet 
any attempt to arrange the incidents 
of Saint-Germain*s life upon paper has proved 
to be as futile and unsatisfactory as the effort 
to piece together a puzzle of which some of the 
principal parts were missing. Neither contem- 
porary memoir-writers nor private friends have 
laid bare the real business or ambition of the 
elegant figure who was admired for so many 
years of the eighteenth century in Europe as 
*^ der Wundermann." The things known about 
him are many, but they are outnumbered by 
the things that are not known. It is known, 
for example, that he was employed in the secret 
service of Louis the Fifteenth ; that he played 
the violin ; wrote concertos and songs which 
are still extant ; was chemist, linguist, illu- 
minate, and adept; but his name, his nation- 
ality, his means of subsistence, his object in 
travelling and in intercourse with his fellow 

6$ E 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

creatures are not known, and no one yet has 
made more than plausible suggestions as to the 
relation his accomplishments and activities bore 
to the central purpose of his life. He has been 
called an adventurer, but though discredit is 
reflected on him by the word it throws no 
particular light on his career. Scepticism and 
credulity walked hand in hand in the eighteenth 
century, as they do to-day, and many persons 
who had cast off the forms of traditional religion 
were ready to accord unquestioning reverence 
to men who claimed or evidenced the possession 
of- supernatural powers, and it is probable that 
Saint-Germain made use of this state of affairs 
to prosecute his own designs. 

It is interesting to remember that while 
Voltaire, with his searchlight mind, was illumi- 
nating the darker aspects of ecclesiasticism, 
while Boulanger and Beccaria were engaging 
their keen intellects in unmasking the whole 
foundation and structure of superstition, 
Cagliostro was dazzling the people by magical 
experiments, Cassanova was mystifying audi- 
ences, Schroepfer professing, by means of his 
famous mirror, to evoke spirits, and Cazotte 
practising the art of prophecy. Though the 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

contrast is curious it is not unnatural, for there 
must always be many people in the world who 
are oppressed with the sense of imprisonment, 
and who are grateful to those enchanters who 
lift men, however it may be, out of the hard 
and fast limitations of this mortal life into a 
sphere where limitations have no existence and 
where all things become possible. In this sense 
of freedom and potentiality lie the charm and 
interest of those strange lives that have baffled 
scrutiny. 

It is so rare for a human life to embody in 
action that imaginative quality which attracts 
us in poetry and art, that suggestiveness which 
gives the feeling of hidden power and fulness. 
The struggle to work and the effort to succeed 
are generally visible ; the capacity is nearly 
always to be gauged ; and the individual may 
usually be summed up as a bundle of qualities 
producing certain results. Lives in which ima- 
gination seems to rule all action, thought, and 
speech are almost unknown, and careers in which 
the boundaries of daily life are no longer felt 
must appeal to those who, either by circumstance 
or personality, are debarred from ever themselves 
realising the illusion of freedom. 

67 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

A world of new diversion is created for us 
by such adventurings as those of Saint-Germain, 
and though in the future the enigma of his life 
may be solved by some laborious student, at 
present it is fraught with all the qualities of 
romance. Now and again the curtain which 
shrouds his actions is drawn aside, and we are 
permitted to see him fiddling in the music room 
at Versailles, gossiping with Horace Walpole 
in London, sitting in Frederick the Great's 
library at Berlin, or conducting Illuminist meet- 
ings in caverns by the Rhine. But the curtain 
is often down, and it is only by a process of 
induction that the isolated scenes can be strung 
together into an intelligible drama of existence. 

The travels of the Comte de Saint-Germain 
covered a long period of years and a great range 
of countries. From Persia to France and from 
Calcutta to Rome he was known and respected. 
Horace Walpole spoke with him in London in 
1745 ; Clive knew him in India in 1756 ; 
Madame d'Adhemar alleges that she met him 
in Paris in 1789, five years after his supposed 
death : while other persons pretend to have 
held conversations with him in the early nine- 
teenth century. He was on familiar and inti- 

68 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

mate terms with the crowned heads of Europe, 
and the honoured friend of many distinguished 
persons of all nationalities. He is often men- 
tioned in the memoirs and letters of the day, 
and always as a man of mystery. Frederick 
the Great, Voltaire, Madame de Pompadour, 
Rousseau, Chatham, and Walpole, who all knew 
him personally, rivalled each other in curiosity 
as to his origin. No one, during the many 
decades in which he was before the world, 
succeeded, however, in discovering why he 
appeared as a Jacobite agent in London, as a 
conspirator in Petersburg, as an alchemist and 
connoisseur of pictures in Paris, or as a Russian 
General at Naples. 

People agreed, and this in a day when a high 
value was set upon manners and evidence of 
breeding, that Saint-Germain was well born. 
His grace of bearing and ease in all society 
were charming. Thiebault says : '' In appear- 
ance Saint-Germain was refined and intellectual. 
He was clearly of gentle birth and had moved 
in good society ... he was a wise and prudent 
man who never wilfully offended against the 
code of honour or did anything that might 
offend our sense of probity." When in Paris 

69 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

his portrait was painted for the Marquis d'Urf6, 
and from this picture was made an engraving 
on copper by N. Thomas, of Paris (1783). 
The intelligent and rather whimsical young 
face set above the delicate shoulders gives the 
idea that Saint-Germain was but a little man. 
The portrait is labelled '' Marquis de S. Ger- 
main, der Wundermann." It was dedicated to 
to the Comte de Milly, and beneath it was 
inscribed this verse : 

Ainsi que Prometh^e il deroba le feu 

Par qui le monde existe et par qui tout respire ; 

La nature a sa voix obeit et se meurt, 

S'il n'est pas Dieu lui-meme un Dieu puissant I'inspire. 

Though men agreed about his grace of 
manner they disagreed as to theories of his 
origin, and this may be partly owing to the fact 
that he chose to live under so many assumed 
names. In Paris, the Hague, London, and 
Petersburg he was the Comte de Saint-Germain ; 
in Genoa and Leghorn, Count SoItykofF; in 
Venice, Count Bellamare or Aymar ; in Milan 
and Leipzig, Chevalier Weldon ; in Schwalbach 
and Triesdag, Czarogy, which he pointed out 
was but the anagram for the family from which 
he really sprang — -Ragoczy. He told Prince 

70 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

Charles of Hesse that he was the son of Prince 
Ragoczy, and that he had assumed the name of 
Saint-Germain to please himself. He knew a 
good deal about Italy, and Madame de Pompa- 
dour detected an Italian accent in all he said, 
and so thought him of Italian birth ; but this 
might be accounted for if he really was educated 
at the University of Siena. The evidence for 
this is slight, but there is no suggestion that he 
was educated elsewhere, and Madame de Genlis 
says that she heard men talk of him as a student 
there during a visit paid to that town. Another 
theory is that he was the son of a cloth merchant 
in Moscow, and that his father's business ac- 
counted for his unfailing supply of gold. The 
theory of his Russian descent is supported by 
the fact that he talked Russian fluently ; by the 
secret instructions of Choiseul to Pitt (1760) to 
have the Count arrested as a Russian spy ; as 
well as by his having been concerned in the 
OrloiF conspiracy to dethrone the Czar Peter and 
to set up Catherine the Second in his place. 

He is said to have been born in the same 
year as Louis the Fifteenth (1710), but this is 
a matter of no moment, as it would not help 
men to understand Saint-Germain any the 

71 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

better to have his baptismal certificate in their 
hands, and it is enough to know that he lived 
and was well known in Europe from 1742 to 
1782 as a man of young and interesting appear- 
ance. Queen Christina of Sweden made a wise 
observation when she said : " There is no other 
youth but vigour of soul and body ; every one 
who has this vigour is young, no matter if he 
be a hundred years old, and every one who has 
it not is old, no matter if his years number but 
eighteen.'' All who came in contact with Saint- 
Germain noticed that he possessed this vigour 
and alertness of body and soul to a remarkable 
extent. People thought he lived by virtue of 
some charm, for he was never known to eat in 
public, to confess to illness or fatigue, or to 
grow perceptibly older in looks. 

From 1737 to 1742 he was in Asia, at the 
Court of the Shah of Persia for a while, after- 
wards learning the mysticism and philosophy of 
the Orient in secluded mountain monasteries. 
It was said that he became an adept, and there 
is no doubt that he was in possession of secrets 
and knowledge with which the majority of men 
are unacquainted. His study of Oriental lan- 
guages was profound, his love of the East a 

72 



The Comte de Saint-Germam 

passion, and on his return to Europe a rumour 
circulated that near Aix he had constructed a 
retreat where, sitting on a golden altar in the 
attitude of the conventional Buddha, he passed 
periods of intense contemplation. In 1 743 he 
came to England, and apparently lived in 
London in a quiet way, writing music, playing 
the violin, and industriously working in Jacobite 
plots. As an active Freemason he would quite 
naturally have been employed in this fashion. 
Legitimists, it will be remembered, had been 
the means of introducing the English School of 
Masonry into France, and Saint-Germain had 
affiliated himself early to one of the first of the 
Anglo-French lodges. To be both Jacobite 
and Jacobin was no impossibility, for the one 
activity grew in many instances out of the 
other. The Count was often in direct communi- 
cation with the Pretender, but when arrested 
on suspicion of being concerned in attempts to 
restore the Stuart dynasty no incriminating 
papers were found in his possession, and he was 
at once released. 

Horace Walpole says : 

" The other day they seized an odd man, the 

73 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

Count Saint- Germain. He has been here these 
two years and will not tell who he is or whence, 
but professes . . . that he does not go by his 
right name. . . . He sings and plays on the 
violin wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not 
very sensible. He is called an Italian, a 
Spaniard, a Pole ; a somebody that married a 
great fortune in Mexico and ran away with her 
jewels to Constantinople ; a priest, a fiddler, a 
vast nobleman. The Prince of Wales has had 
an unsated curiosity about him, but in vain. 
However nothing has been made out against 
him ; he is released ; and what convinces me 
that he is not a gentleman, stays here, and talks 
of his being taken up for a spy." * 

He left a musical record behind him to 
remind English people of his sojourn in this 
country. Many of his compositions were pub- 
lished by Walsh, in Catherine Street, Strand, and 
his earliest English song, '' Oh, wouldst thou 
know what sacred charms," came out while he was 
still on his first visit to London ; but on quitting 
this city he entrusted certain other settings of 
words to Walsh, such as "Jove, when he saw," and 

* "Letters of Horace Walpole," vol. ii. p. l6i. 
74 



The Comfe de Saint-Germain 

the arias out of his little opera *' L'Inconstanza 
Delusa/' both of which compositions were pub- 
lished during his absence from England. When 
he returned, in 1760, he gave the world a great 
many new songs, followed in 1780 by a set of 
solos for the violin. He was an industrious 
and capable artist, and attracted a great deal of 
fashionable attention to himself both as composer 
and executant. 

" With regard to music, he not only played 
but composed ; and both in a high taste. Nay, 
his very ideas were accommodated to the art ; 
and in those occurrences which had no relation 
to music he found means to express himself in 
figurative terms deduced from this science. 
There could not be a more artful way of 
showing his attention to the subject. I 
remember an incident which impressed it 
strongly on my memory. I had the honour 

to be at an assembly of Lady , who to 

many other good and great accomplishments 
added a taste for music so delicate that she was 
made a judge in the dispute of masters. This 
stranger was to be of the party ; and towards 
evening he came in his usual free and polite 

75 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

manner, but with more hurry than was custom- 
ary, and with his fingers stopped in his ears. I 
can conceive easily that in most men this would 
have been a very ungraceful attitude, and I am 
afraid it would have been construed into an 
ungenteel entrance ; but he had a manner that 
made everything agreeable. They had been 
emptying a cartload of stones just at the door, 
to mend the pavement : he threw himself into 
a chair and, when the lady asked what was 
the matter, he pointed to the place and said, 
' I am stunned with a whole cartload ot 
discords.' " * 

According to Madame de Pompadour Saint- 
Germain made his first appearance in France in 
1749. Louis the Fifteenth thought him an 
entertaining and agreeable addition to his Court, 
and listened to his stories of adventures in 
every land and his gossip on the most intimate 
affairs of the European chanceries with delight. 
No one at the Court knew anything about the 
Count's history, but he seems to have made the 
chance acquaintance of Belle Isle and by him to 
have been introduced to Madame de Pompadour. 
* "London Chronicle," June 1760. 

76 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

A judicious bestowal of gifts quickly ingratiated 
him with his new patrons. He gave pictures 
by Velasquez and Murillo to Louis XV., 
and to the '^ Marquise '' gems of great value. 
His many accomplishments diverted the King. 
Sometimes he showed off his retentive memory 
by repeating pages of print after one reading ; 
sometimes he played the violin ; and sometimes 
he sang ; sometimes he wrote with both hands 
at once, and proved that the compartments of 
his brain worked independently by inscribing 
a love letter and a set of verses simultane- 
ously. The only poem of that date attributed 
to him which is still extant is a mystical 
sonnet : 

Curieux scrutateur de la Nature entiere, 

J'ai connu du grand tout le principe et la fin. 

J'ai vu For en puissance au fond de sa riviere, 
J'ai saisi sa matiere et surpris son levain. 

J'expliquai par quel art I'ame aux flancs d'une mere 
Fait sa maison, I'emporte, et comment un pepin 

Mis centre un grain de ble, sous Thumide poussiere ; 
L'un plante et I'autre cep, sont le pain et le vin. 

Rien n'etait, Dieu voulant, rien devint quelque chose, 
J'en doutais, je cherchai sur quoi I'univers pose, 
Rien gardait I'equilibre et servait de soutien. 

n 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

Enfin avec le poids de Peloge et du blame 
Je pesai I'eternel ; il appella mon ame : 
Je mourrai, j'adorai, je ne savais plus rien.* 

Saint-Germain was credited with the possession 
of alchemical secrets, and he was said to practise 
the crystallisation of carbon. Madame de 
Hausset, who was as credulous as most of the 
Court ladies of that day, tells how Louis XV. 
showed the Count a large diamond with 
a flaw, remarking that it would be worth 
double if it were flawless. The alchemist 
promptly oflFered, in four weeks' time, to make 
it so, and begged that a jeweller might be 
summoned to act as judge in the matter. At 
the appointed time the jeweller, who had valued 
the diamond at 6000 francs in the first instance, 
ofFered the King 10,000 francs for the improved 
stone. Count Cobenzl was present at '^ the 
transmutation of iron into a metal as beautiful 
as gold, and at least as good for all goldsmith's 
work." Every one seemed to be convinced by 
ocular demonstration of the truth of Saint- 
Germain's pretensions, and when Quesnay dared 

* " Poemes Philosophiques sur I'Homme." Chez Mer- 
cier, Paris. 1795. 

78 



The Cornte de Saint-Germain 

to call him a quack he was severely reprimanded 
by the King. 

Whatever we may think to-day of Saint- 
Germain's claims to be an alchemist we cannot 
doubt that he was a working chemist, for 
Madame de Genlis says : '' He was well 
acquainted with physics and a very great 
chemist. My father, who was well qualified 
to judge, was a great admirer of his abilities 
in this respect." She also narrates that he 
painted pictures in wonderful colours, from 
which he got "unprecedented effects." It 
seems just possible that he may in some way 
have anticipated the discovery of Unverdorben 
and the practice of Perkins with regard to 
aniline dyes, for he produced brilliant results 
without the agency of either cochineal or indigo. 
Kaunitz, who in 1755 negotiated the pact be- 
tween Vienna and Versailles, received a letter 
from his fellow countryman Cobenzl expressing 
astonishment at Saint-Germain's discoveries and 
telling of experiments made in dyeing skins and 
other substances under his own eyes. The 
treatment of skins he asserted **was carried 
to a perfection which surpassed all the moroccos 
in the world ; the dyeing of silks was perfected 

79 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

to a degree hitherto unknown ; likewise the 
dyeing of woollens ; wood was dyed in the 
most brilliant colours which penetrated through 
and through the whole. All this was accom- 
plished without the aid of indigo or cochineal, 
but with the commonest ingredients and conse- 
quently at a very moderate price. He composed 
colours for painting, making ultramarine as per- 
fect as if made from lapis-lazuli ; and he could 
destroy the smell of painting oils, and make the 
best oil of Provence from the oils of Navette, of 
Cobat, and from other oils even worse. I have 
in my hand all these productions made under 
my own eyes." 

Saint-Germain always attributed his know- 
ledge of occult chemistry to his sojourn in 
Asia. In 1755 he went to the East again 
for the second time, and writing to Count 
von Lamberg he said, " 1 am indebted for my 
knowledge of melting jewels to my second 
journey to India. On my first expedition I 
had but a very faint idea of this wonderful 
secret, and all the experiments I made in 
Vienna, Paris, and London were as such 
worthless." 

This journey to India was probably under- 
80 - 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

taken at the instance of Louis XV., who for 
some years employed Saint-Germain as a secret 
agent. The Count says that he travelled out 
in the same ship as General Clive, under the 
command of Vice-Admiral Watson, in what 
capacity he does not inform us, but it may 
have been as ship's doctor. After learning all 
he could of the English schemes for the sub- 
jugation of India he returned to Europe in 
the year in which Calcutta was retaken and 
the battle of Plassy fought. Going straight 
to his employer in Paris he was immediately 
installed as a mark of royal favour in a suite 
of rooms at Chambord. 

Books have been written on the secret 
service organised by the Due de Broglie for 
Louis XV., and many of the letters to the 
emissaries employed have been published. 
Either the King or De Broglie had an un- 
usual gift for discerning men that were likely 
to serve them well in such undertakings. The 
notorious Chevalier d'Eon was commissioned 
as a secret agent to Russia before he entered 
the official diplomatic service, and it will 
be remembered that he remained for some 
months as ''lectrice" to Catherine II. before 

8l F 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

he was ordered to reassume man's dress and 
figure as secretary of embassy at Petersburg. 
Saint-Germain was employed on many private 
missions by Louis XV., who both trusted his dis- 
cretion and admired his wit. His apparent con- 
tempt for his fellow creatures pleased the King. 
"To entertain any esteem for men, Sire, one must 
be neither a confessor, a minister, nor a police 
officer," he one day remarked. ''You may as 
well add, Comte," replied Louis XV., " a king." 
Sated with pleasure and bored with a life in 
which no wish, however faint, remained un- 
gratified, Louis XV. found great entertainment 
after Cardinal Fleury's death in being his own 
minister for foreign affairs. He had been 
brought up to trust no one, and it gave him 
a sense of security and power to have within 
his hands a means of checking his accredited 
State officials. In consequence of the way in 
which his secret service was organised the King 
was often in possession of news earlier than his 
ministers, and could hardly refrain from cynical 
laughter when belated information was tendered 
by them to him on matters of which he was 
already cognisant. Negotiations for peace and 
alliance were essayed in various countries ; men 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

were unofficially sounded, public sentiment 
quietly gauged, opinions dexterously extracted, 
in such a way that when open and official 
action was taken the King could predict in an 
omniscient manner the outcome of affairs. 

It is necessarily difficult to track the foot- 
steps of any secret agent, and except for 
occasional glimpses caught of Saint-Germain 
during the Seven Years' War through the 
despatches of generals we cannot know much 
of his doings. He was anxious that France 
should make an alliance with Prussia, and it 
will be remembered that at this time there were 
two policies pulling against each other at the 
French Court — that of Choiseul, whose first 
act as Prime Minister was to ratify the treaty 
of peace with Maria Theresa (1758) made by 
his predecessor Bernis (1756), and that of the 
Belle-Isles, who were incessantly intriguing to 
get a special covenant made with Prussia, and 
so to break up the alliance between France and 
Austria, on which the credit of Choiseul rested. 
This special treaty was, after a while, drawn 
up, and Saint-Germain, who received the docu- 
ment in cypher from the King's own hand, was 
despatched to discuss the negotiation with 

83 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

Frederick the Great. Choiseul, though he was 
unaware of this transaction, was naturally angry 
at the favour shown to Saint- Germain by his 
master, and determined to compass his down- 
fall, and he did not regret the antics of a young 
Englishman, Lord Gower, at that time resident 
in Paris, who posed as '' der Wundermann/' 
boasting that he had been present at the 
Council of Trent, and had the secret of im- 
mortality, as well as doing all kinds of ridiculous 
things which indirectly brought discredit on 
Saint-Germain. It seems possible that some 
knowledge of the Count^s mission to the 
Prussian King may have leaked out, for Vol- 
taire, in a letter to that monarch, said : 

** Your ministers doubtless are likely to have 
a better look-out at Breda than I : Choiseul, 
Kaunitz, and Pitt do not tell me their secret. 
It is said to be only known by Saint-Germain, 
who supped formerly at Trenta with the 
Council Fathers, and who will probably have 
the honour of seeing your Majesty in the 
course of fifty years. He is a man who never 
dies and who knows everything.*' 

Saint-Germain greatly disturbed the peace of 
84 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 



mind of foreign generals and ministers, who 
became uneasy and suspicious when he discussed 
affairs with them, for no one knew how far the 
Count was empowered by the French King to 
treat of State business. A secret agent, after all, 
may at any moment be disavowed, and must 
always be viewed by the official world in the light 
of a spy. General Yorke, who was commanding 
the English forces in this campaign, wrote to 
his chief, Lord Holdernesse, several times on 
the subject of Saint-Germain, and it seems 
possible from the nature of Lord Holdernesse's 
reply that they may have had information in 
England as to Saint-Germain's real position 
with the King. Writing from the Hague in 
March 1760, General Yorke says : 

" Your lordship knows the history of that 
extraordinary man known by the name of 
Count Saint-Germain, who resided some time in 
England, where he did nothing ; and has within 
these two or three years resided in France, 
where he has been upon the most familiar footing 
with the French King, Madame de Pompadour, 
Monsieur de Belle-Isle, &c. ; which has pro- 
cured him a grant of the Royal Castle of 

85 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

Chambord, and has enabled him to make a 
certain figure in that country. He appeared 
for some days at Amsterdam, where he was 
much caressed and talked of, and upon the 
marriage of Princess Caroline he alighted at the 
Hague. The same curiosity created the same 
attention to him here. . . . Monsieur d'Aifry 
treats him with respect and attention, but is 
very jealous of him, and did not so much as 
renew my acquaintance with him." * 

Saint-Germain discussed the possibilities of 
peace with General Yorke, but when the English- 
man showed himself secretive and undesirous of 
committing himself to a confidential talk the 
Count produced two letters from Belle- Isle by 
way of credentials. In these letters the English 
general remarked that great praise was bestowed 
on Saint-Germain. The Count told Yorke that 
the King, the Dauphin, Madame de Pompadour, 
and the Court desired peace with England, and 
that the only two ministers who wished to avoid 
this consummation were Choiseul and Bernis. 
Yorke did not enjoy confiding in Saint-Germain, 

* Lord Holdernesse's Despatches, 1760. 6818 plut. 
P.L. clxviii. I (12). " Mitchell Papers/' vol. xv. 

86 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

and talked but in vague and general terms in 
reply to his advances. Lord Holdernesse 
approved this caution, but said that His Majesty 
(George II.) did not think it unlikely that 
Saint-Germain might have real authorisation 
to talk as he has done, but that General Yorke 
should be reminded that he cannot be dis- 
avowed by his Government, as Saint-Germain 
may be whenever it pleases Louis XV. so to do. 
Choiseul, rather naturally, did not like being 
undermined by Louis XV.'s secret agents, and 
was especially incensed over Saint-Germain's 
action at the Hague. He went so far as to 
write to the official French representative, 
D'AiFry, to order him to demand the States- 
General to give up Saint-Germain, and that 
being done to bind him hand and foot and send 
him to the Bastille. D'Affi-y meanwhile had 
written to Choiseul a despatch bitterly reproach- 
ing him for allowing a peace to be negotiated 
under his very eyes at the Hague, without 
informing him of it. This despatch Choiseul 
read in Council, after which he repeated his own 
instructions to D'AfFry on the extradition of 
Saint-Germain, and said, looking at Louis XV. 
and Belle-Isle : " If I did not give myself time 

8f 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

to take the orders of the King it is because 
I am convinced that no one here would be rash 
enough to negotiate a treaty of peace without 
the knowledge of your Majesty's Minister 
for Foreign Affairs." 

Other diplomats who met Saint-Germain at 
the Hague also wrote to the Foreign Secretaries 
of their respective countries for instructions. It 
was so puzzling to them and to every one else 
that M. d'Affry should at first have welcomed 
Saint-Germain and then have nothing to say to 
him, and that Choiseul should go out of his 
way to discredit him by demanding his arrest. 
Bentinck, the President of the Deputy Com- 
missioners of the Province of Holland, who was 
most friendly with Saint-Germain, was extremely 
grieved that a plea for his arrest should have 
been laid before the States-General by M. d'AfFry 
at the instance of the French Government, and 
immediately assisted the Count to escape from 
the Hague. A few days after Saint-Germain 
had started for England M. d'Affry was recalled 
by his Court. 

Kauderbach wrote to Prince Galitzin on the 
matter : 

" A certain Count Saint-Germain has appeared 
88 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

here lately (the Hague), and been the subject of 
much discourse, from his being suspected of 
having some private commission relating to the 
peace. He pretended to be very intimate with 
Madame Pompadour and in great favour with 
the King. At first he was much taken notice of 
by M. d'AfFry ; and had insinuated himself into 
families of fashion, both here and at Amsterdam. 
But within these few days M. d'AfFry has been 
with the Pensionary and with me, and has 
showed us a letter from M. de Choiseul, in 
which he says that the King had heard of Saint- 
Germain's conduct with indignation ; that he 
was a vagabond, a cheat, and a worthless fellow, 
and that the King ordered him (M. d'Affry) 
to demand him of Their High Mightinesses, 
and to desire that he may be arrested and sent 
immediately to Lisle, in order to his being 
brought from thence and confined in France. 
The gentleman having got some ground to 
suspect what was preparing for him, went off, 
and it is thought he is gone to England, where 
he may probably open some new scene." * 

* The Hague, April i8, 1760. Series Foreign Ambas- 
sadors (Intercepted). Extract from copy of letter from 
M. Kauderbach to Prince Galitzin, received April 22, 1760. 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

Later on in the same day Kauderbach dis- 
covered that Bentinck had assisted him to 
escape, that he was with Saint-Germain till one 
hour past midnight one morning, and that four 
hours later a carriage with four horses came to 
convey the Count to Helvoet Sluys. He further 
wishes Galitzin joy of the adventurer. 

"I think him at the end of his resources. 
He has pawned coloured stones here, such as 
opals, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies, and this 
is the man who pretends he can convert moun- 
tains into gold who has lived like this at the 
Hague ! He lies in a scandalous way, and he 
tried to convince us that he had completely 
cured a man who had cut lofF his thumb. He 
picked up the thumb thirty yards away from its 
owner and stuck it on again with strong glue, 
ex ungue leonem. I have seen the papers by 
which he pretends he is authorised to be con- 
fidential negotiator ; they consist of a passport 
from the King of France and two letters from 
Marshal Belle-Isle, which, after all, stand for 
nothing, as the Marshal is always corresponding 
with the most vile newsmongers," 

Kauderbach's opinion was not held by every 
90 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

one, for Saint-Germain had greatly impressed 
a Dutch nobleman, who was beyond measure 
distressed at his sudden departure from the 
Hague. Writing to England Count de la 
" Watn '* said, " I know that you are the 
greatest man on earth, and I am mortified that 
these wretched people annoy you and intrigue 
against your peace-making efforts. ... I 
hear that M. d'Affry has been unexpectedly 
summoned by his Court. I only hope he may 
get what he deserves." Saint-Germain mean- 
while went to England, where he suffered arrest. 
** His examination has produced nothing very 
material," wrote Lord Holdernesse to Mitchell, 
the British envoy in Prussia, but he still thought 
it advisable for the Count to leave England. 
This he apparently did not do, for the London 
papers of June 1760 tell stories of his behaviour 
and make guesses as to his origin and mission. 

" Whatever may have been the business of a 
certain foreigner here about whom the French 
have just made or have affected to make a 
great bustle, there is something in his most 
unintelligible history that is very entertaining ; 
and there are accounts of transactions which 

91 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 



bound so nearly upon the marvellous that It 
is impossible but that they must excite the 
attention of this Athenian age. I imagine this 
gentleman, against whom no ill was ever alleged, 
and for whose genius and knowledge I have the 
most sincere respect, will not take umbrage at 
my observing that the high title he assumes is 
not the right of lineage or the gift of royal 
favour ; what is his real name is perhaps one of 
those mysteries which at his death will surprise 
the world more than all the strange incidents of 
his life ; but himself will not be averse, I think, 
to own this, by which he goes, is no more than 
a travelling title. 

" There seems something insulting In the 
term un inconnu^ by which the French have 
spoken of him ; and the terms we have borrowed 
from their language of an aventurier and a 
chevalier d' Industrie always convey reproach, as 
they have been applied to this — I had almost 
said nobleman. It is justice to declare that in 
any ill sense they appear to be very foreign from 
his character. It is certain that, like the persons 
generally understood by these denominations, 
he has supported himself always at a consider- 
able expense, and in perfect independence, with- 

92 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

out any visible or known way of living ; but let 
those who say this always add that he does not 
play ; nor is there perhaps a person in the world 
who can say he has enriched himself sixpence at 
his expense. 

" The country of this stranger is as perfectly 
unknown as his name ; but concerning both, as 
also of his early life, busy conjecture has taken 
the place of knowledge ; and as it was equal 
what to invent, the perverseness of human 
nature and perhaps envy in those who took the 
charge of the invention has led them to select 
passages less favourable than would have been 
furnished by truth. Till more authentic mate- 
rials shall have been produced it will be proper 
that the world suspend their curiosity, and 
charity requires not to believe some things which 
have no foundation. 

" All we can with justice say is : This gen- 
tleman is to be considered as an unknown and 
inoffensive stranger, who has supplies for a large 
expence, the sources of which are not under- 
stood. 

"Many years ago he was in England, and 
since that time has visited the several other 
European kingdoms, always keeping up the 

93 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

appearance of a man of fashion, and always 
living with credit. 

'^ The 'reader who remembers Gil Bias's 
master who spent his money without anybody's 
understanding how he lived, 'tis applicable in 
more respects than one to this stranger, who, 
like him, has been examined also in dangerous 
times, but found innocent and respectable. But 
there is this difference, that the hero of our 
story seems to have his money concentrated, as 
chymists keep their powerful menstruums, not 
in its natural and bulky form, for no carts used 
to come loaded to his lodgings. 

" He had the address to find the reigning 
foible always of the place where he was going to 
reside, and on that he built the scheme of ren- 
dering himself agreeable. When he came here 
and he found music was the hobby of this 
country, and took the fiddle with as good grace 
as if he had been a native player in whom true 
virtu reigns ; and there he appeared a connoisseur 
in gems, antiques, and medals ; in France he 
was a fop, in Germany a chymist. 

" By these arts he introduced himself in each 
of those countries, and to his high praise it must 
be owned that to whichever of them or to what- 

94 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

soever else it may have been that he was bred, 
yet whichever he chose for the time seemed to 
have been the only employment of his life. 

" 'Twas thus in all the rest ; among the 
Germans, where he played chymistry, he was 
every inch a chymist ; and he was certainly in 
Paris every inch a fop. From Germany he 
carried into France the reputation of a high and 
sovereign alchymist, who possessed the secret 
powder, and in consequence the universal medi- 
cine. The whisper ran the stranger could make 
gold. The expence at which he lived seemed 
to ^confirm that account ; but the minister at 
that time, to whom the matter had been whis- 
pered as important, smiling answered he would 
put it on a short issue. He ordered an enquiry 
to be made whence the remittances he received 
came, and told those who had applied to him 
that he would soon show them what quarries 
they were which yielded this philosopher's stone. 
The means that great man took to explain the 
mystery, though very judicious, served only to 
increase it ; whether the stranger had accounts 
of the enquiry that was ordered and found 
means to evade it, and by what other accident 
'tis not known, but the fact is that in the space 

95 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

of two years, while he was thus watched, he lived 
as usual, paid for everything in ready money, 
and yet no remittance came into the kingdom 
for him. 

" The thing was spoken ot and none now 
doubted what at first had been treated as a 
chimera ; he was understood to possess, with 
the other grand secret, a remedy for all diseases, 
and even for the infirmities in which time 
triumphs over the human fabric." * 

One diplomat, who was as curious as every 
one else in London, wrote home to say that the 
Count frequented the houses of "the best families 
in England," that he was " well-dressed, modest, 
and never ran into debt.'* Another secretary 
of embassy. Von Edelsheim, received a letter 
from his master, Frederick the Great,! com- 
menting on the political phenomenon — " a man 
whom no one has been able to understand, a 
man so high in favour with the French King 
that he had thought of presenting him with the 
Palace of Chambord." The secret, if secret 

* Anecdotes of a Mysterious Stranger, "London 
Chronicle/' May 31 to June 3, 1760. 

t Dated from Freyberg, "CEuvresposthumesdeFr6d.il., 
Roi de Prusse," vol. iii. p. 73. Berlin 1783. 

96 



The Comfe de Saint 'Germain 

there was, of Saint-Germain's life was well kept, 
for no one knew more about him in London 
after he had been there several months than they 
did when he arrived. When his business in 
England was over he went to France, and in the 
following year the Marquis d'Urfe met him in 
the Bois de Boulogne. From Paris he went to 
Petersburg to help the daughter of his old friend 
Princess Anhalt-Zerbst to mount the throne of 
Russia. This daughter, Catherine, had for 
seventeen miserable years been married to a 
drunken and dissolute husband, who, on the 
death of his aunt, the Tsarina Elizabeth, in 1 762, 
became the Tsar Peter. In this year his wife, 
together with the Orloffs and Saint-Germain, 
planned his overthrow. The Royal guards were 
incited to revolt ; Peter was coerced into abdi- 
cation ; the priests were won over and were 
persuaded to anoint Catherine as proxy for her 
son. The Orloffs completed the coup ddtat by 
strangling Peter and proclaiming Catherine 
Empress in her own right. Gregor OrloiF, who 
was the Tsarina's lover, told the Margrave of 
Brandenburg-Anspach how large a part in this 
revolution Saint-Germain played. Catherine II. 
lived to enjoy the throne she had seized 

97 G 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

for twenty-nine years (1762-91), and during at 
least the earlier portion of that time she gave 
her protection to the masonic and Illuminist 
societies founded by Saint-Germain and his 
accomplices within her realm, though later she 
turned violently against them. From Peters- 
burg the Count went to Brussels, where he 
spent Christmas 1762. Cobenzl, who renewed 
acquaintance with him about this time, found 
him ** the most singular man " he had ever 
known, and announced that he believed him to 
be " the son of a clandestine union in a power- 
ful and illustrious family. Possessed of great 
wealth, he lives in the greatest simplicity ; he 
knows everything and shows an uprightness and 
a goodness of soul worthy of admiration." 
Cobenzl was particularly interested in Saint- 
Germain's chemical experiments, and longed to 
put some of his inventions to practical money- 
making uses. He begged the Count to set up 
an industry at Tournay, and recommended him 
to a "good and trustworthy merchant'* there 
of his acquaintance. His friend, who at that 
time was known as M. de Zurmont, acceded to 
his request and set up a factory where a dyeing 
business was carried on with profitable results. 

98 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

While Saint-Germain was living at Tournay 
Casanova arrived at the town, and being in- 
formed of the presence of the Count within it 
desired to be presented to him. On being told 
that M. de Zurmont received no one he wrote 
to request an interview, which was granted 
on the condition that Casanova should come 
incognito^ and that he should not expect to be 
invited to partake of food. The Count, who 
was dressed during this interview in Armenian 
clothes, and who wore a long beard, talked 
much of his factory and of the interest which 
Graf Cobenzl took in the experiment. 

Madame de Pompadour during her life had 
extended both to Saint-Germain and Casanova 
a protective and kindly patronage, and at her 
death Saint-Germain disappeared from France 
for four years. During this disappearance from 
obvious life he was most probably carrying out 
those larger activities to which his whole being 
was devoted. The founding of new masonic 
lodges, the initiation of illuminates, the organi- 
sation of fresh groups in different parts of 
Europe, as well as the share he took in 
Weishaupt's great scheme for the amalgamation 
of secret societies, kept him constantly occupied 

99 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

and continuously travelling. His advantages 
as an illuminate agent were enormous, and he 
could work more effectively for the emancipa- 
tion of man from the ancient tyrannies than 
almost any one of his generation. As a political 
agent he gained the ear and heard the views of 
the most inaccessible ministers in Europe ; as a 
man of fashion he was received in every house ; 
as an alchemist and magician he invested himself 
in the eyes of the crowd with awe and mystery ; 
as a musician he disarmed suspicion and was 
welcomed by the ladies of all courts ; but these 
various activities seemed to have served only 
as a cloak for the great work of his life, served 
but to conceal from an unspeculative generation 
the seriousness of his real mission. In 1768 
the course of his journey ings took him to 
Berlin, where the celebrated Pernetti was living. 
This learned Benedictine, who was a free- 
thinker and in favour of the secularisation of 
his order, had left Avignon a short while be- 
fore to become librarian to the encyclopaedist 
King. He welcomed the arrival of Saint- 
Germain with delight, and " was not slow in 
recognising in him the characteristics of an 
adept." Thiebault says that during the year 

100 



The Comte de Saint'-Germain 

of his stay in Berlin they " had marvels without 
end, but never anything mean or scandalous." 

From Berlin he went to Italy, travelling 
under the name of D'Aymar or Bellamare, and 
Graf von Lamberg discovered him near Venice 
experimenting in the bleaching of flax. It 
appears that he had found time to organise a 
small industry there since leaving Germany, 
for he ^had over a hundred hands in regular 
employment. Von Lamberg persuaded Saint- 
Germain to travel with him, and they visited 
Corsica in the year of Napoleon's birth (1769). 
A newsletter from Tunis shows that after 
exploring that island they went to Africa. 
" Graf Max. v. Lamberg, having paid a visit 
to Corsica to make various investigations, has 
been staying here (Tunis) since the end of 
June in company with the Signor de Saint- 
Germain, celebrated in Europe for the vastness 
of his political and philosophical knowledge." * 

The mystery of his life became deeper when 
he recrossed the Mediterranean to meet the 
OrlofFs at Leghorn, for while with them he 
wore the uniform of a Russian general. The 
Russians at the time were fighting the Turks 
* " Le Notize del Mondo," Florence, July 1770. 

lOI 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

by sea as well as on the Kaghul, and the OrlofFs 
were waiting to embark for the war. It was 
observed that they addressed Saint- Germain as 
Count SoltykofF. The Count became renowned 
at this time for his recipe for " Acqua Bene- 
detta " {anglice Russian Tea) an infusion used 
on Russian men-of-war to preserve the health of 
the troops in the severe heat. The English 
Consul at Leghorn secured the recipe, and 
wrote home in triumph to announce the 
fact. 

On the fall of his old enemy Choiseul the 
Count hastened to Paris (1770), where he 
established himself splendidly and soon be- 
came an effective figure in the fashionable 
world. His generosity and manner of life 
excited the admiration of the people, and his 
intimacy with the old and now decrepit King 
gave him an importance that impressed the 
vulgar. After two years of French life he 
went on a mission to Vienna where he asso- 
ciated intimately with the Orloffs, to whom he 
had become ^' caro padre." Louis XV., who 
was at the time ruling without the hindrance of 
a Parliament, had probably despatched Saint- 
Germain to the Austrian capital to gather all 

102 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

possible information as to the partition of 
Poland. The Treaty of Petersburg, by which 
this was effected, was arranged during his visit, 
and Austria, Russia, and Prussia shared the 
spoils. After its conclusion Saint-Germain re- 
turned to Paris and remained there till the death 
of Louis XV.* Louis XVL, on his accession, 
recalled Choiseul to his councils, and Saint- 
Germain left France. The next few years he 
spent in Germany in the society of the, at that 
time, unknown leaders of the secret societies. 
Bieberstein, Weishaupt, Prince Charles of 
Hesse, and Mirabeau are known to have been 
his friends ; he instructed Cagliostro in the 
mysteries of the magician's craft, and worked 
in conjunction with Nicolai at securing the 
German press in the interest of the perfectibilist 
movement. In 1784 the illuminate, Dr. Biester, 
of Berlin, certified that Saint-Germain had been 
*' dead as a door nail for two years." Great 
uncertainty and vagueness surround his latter 
days, for no confidence can be reposed in the 
announcement by one illuminate of the death 
of another, for, as is well known, all means to 
secure the end were in their code justifiable, 

* May 10, 1774. 
103 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 



and it may have been to the interest of the 
society that Saint-Germain should have been 
thought dead. He is reported to have attended 
the Paris Congress of Masonry as a representa- 
tive mason in 1785, but no proof of this is 
available. Madame d'Adh6mar,* whose me- 
moirs one cannot help suspecting are apocryphal, 
alleges that Saint-Germain frequently had inter- 
views with the King and Queen, in which he 
warned them of their approaching fate, but 
*' M. de Maurepas, not wishing the salvation 
of the country to come from any one but him- 
self, ousted the thaumaturgist and he reappeared 
no more" (1788). 

Madame d'Adhemar copied a letter from 
Saint-Germain containing prophetic verses. 

The time is fast approaching when imprudent France, 
Surrounded by misfortune she might have spared herself. 
Will call to mind such hell as Dante painted. 

Falling shall we see sceptre, censor, scales, 
Towers and escutcheons, even the white flag. 

Great streams of blood are flowing in each town ; 
Sobs only do I hear, and exiles see. 
On all sides civil discord loudly roars 

* "Les Souvenirs de Marie-Antoinette," cit. by Mrs. 
Cooper Oakley, vol. xxiii. Theos. Rev. 

104 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 



And uttering cries, on all sides virtue flees 
As from the Assembly votes of death arise. 
Great God, who can reply to murderous judges ? 
And on what brows august I see the swords descend ! 

The Queen asked Madame d'Adhemar what 
she thought ot the verses. "They are dismaying ; 
but they cannot affect your Majesty,'* she said. 

Saint-Germain, who had other prophecies to 
make, offered to meet Madame d'Adh6mar in 
the Church of the "RecoUets" at the eight 
o'clock Mass. She went to the appointed place 
in her sedan chair and recounts the words of 
the ** Wundermann.'' 

'^ Saint-Germain. I am Cassandra, prophet 
of evil . . . Madame, he who sows the wind 
reaps the whirlwind . . . / can do nothing ; my 
hands are tied by a stronger than myself, 

" Madame. Will you see the Queen ? 

'' Saint-Germain. No ; she is doomed. 

" Madame. Doomed to what ? 

" Saint-Germain. Death. 

" Madame. And you — you too ? 

"Saint-Germain. Yes — -like Cazotte. . . . 
Return to the Palace ; tell the Queen to take 
heed to herself, that this day will be fatal to 
her. . . . 

105 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

"Madame. But M. de Lafayette 

*' Saint-Germain. A balloon inflated with 
wind ! Even now they are settling what to do 
with him, whether he shall be instrument or 
victim ; by noon all wilF be decided. . . . The 
hour of repose is past, and the decrees of 
Providence must be fulfilled. 

'* Madame. What do they want } 
" Saint-Germain. The complete ruin of the 
Bourbons. They will expel them from all the 
thrones they occupy and in less than a century 
they will return in all their different branches to 
the rank of simple private individuals. France 
as Kingdom, Republic, Empire, and mixed 
Government will be tormented, agitated, torn. 
From the hands of class tyrants she will pass to 
those who are ambitious and without merit." 

The prophecies preserved by Madame d'Ad- 
hemar remind us of those of Cazotte, which 
La Harpe affirms were uttered in his presence, 
but it is always difficult for plain people, no 
matter how credulous they be, to credit any 
human being with foreknowledge of events, and 
it is quite probable that Madame d'Adh^mar,* 

* She died in 1822. 
106 



The Comte de Saint-Germain 

writing her memoirs in the early nineteenth 
century in the red afterglow of the Revolution, 
not only confused dates, but even invented 
words more prescient than any Saint-Germain 
ever spoke. However that be, and even if the 
words of Madame d'Adhemar are not to be 
reUed on, we find ourselves still face to face 
with an enigmatic personality of unusual power 
and numberless parts. He has been dead a 
little more than a century, and so in time is 
almost one of ourselves ; he lived surrounded 
by spies and secret agents ; he took no pains to 
conceal his habits from the world, and yet he 
remains a mystery. He was involved in many 
of the most important events of the eighteenth 
century and was responsible for much of its 
diplomacy. Some day, perhaps, his life may be 
set down as a consecutive story inspired by a 
definite aim. It is a work worth doing, for it 
would prove whether Saint-Germain was, as 
men have so often called him, a charlatan, or 
whether he was, as some believe him to have 
been, a political genius of unrivalled ambition 
and great accomplishment. 



107 



RELIGIOUS LIBERTY AND 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 



RELIGIOUS LIBERTY AND 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

IT is impossible to dive into the whirlpool of 
the French Revolution without at times 
being overwhelmed by strong currents ot 
emotion and dramatic sentiment. And because 
its violent action was so often irrelevant to the 
principles and ideals which it was supposed to 
promote, it is easy to lose consciousness, in a 
maze of horror or a mist of pity, of the true 
objective of that tremendous movement. The 
clear issue of the realisation of liberty was 
clouded in Russia some years ago by atrocious 
massacres of Jews, as the clear issue of the 
realisation of religious liberty was blurred in 
France a century ago by monstrous and unneces- 
sary cruelties. The story of the laggard pro- 
gression of the French nation towards tolerance 
and freedom of worship, ending as it did in an 
audacious, meteoric advance, is of absorbing 
interest. During the century which preceded 
the Revolution no advent could have seemed 
more hopelessly delayed than that of religious 

III 



Religious Liberty 



liberty. Erect above the dull tomb of national 
life towered a splendid superstructure of State 
and Church, united and secure. Royalty with 
its armies, laws, nobility, prisons, authority, sub- 
served the ends of ecclesiasticism with its princes, 
discipline, confraternities, monk militia, and 
missionaries, its prestige, persecutions, wealth 
and venerability. Organisations so elaborate 
and dominations so crushing must have appeared 
inviolable to all reformers; yet within the 
darkness of the tomb of national life lay 
germinating the seed which, like the thorn of 
Glastonbury, would one day split the ponderous 
weight in twain. 

Without estimating in some degree the power 
of the Church in France during the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries, and considering the 
way in which that power was used, it is difficult 
to get any sane notion of the meaning and aims 
of the seemingly frenzied innovators of the revo- 
lutionary period. When the proclamation of the 
liberties of the Gallican Church in 1682 made 
it the pride and interest of French Kings to 
defend an institution, confessedly national, and 
to some degree independent of Roman juris- 
diction, the will of the Church became the law 

112 



Religious Liberty 



of the State. But even prior to the assertion of 
her liberties her power had been great and^ 
though the clement Edict of Nantes (1598) had 
appeared to indicate some feebleness in the 
ecclesiastical hold on the machinery of State, its 
gradual annulment and final revocation after 
eighty-seven years' existence showed that the 
Church was not slow to recover her grip of 
affairs. The financial dependence of State on 
Church was one of the chief causes of eccle- 
siastical supremacy. During the seventeenth 
century it had been the custom of the clergy to 
meet every five years to make voluntary contri- 
bution toward the charges of Government. All 
that was implied by the " don gratuit " may be 
gathered from examples picked out at hazard 
from records of the quinquennial assemblages. 
In 1665 the Church requested that heresy 
should be suppressed ; that Catholics should 
not be permitted to become Protestants ; that 
all reformed colleges and schools should be 
closed, and that only Catholics should be 
presented with judgeships. When these requests 
were made law, 4,000,000 livres were paid in to 
the State. In spite of Colbert's endeavours to 
protect the heretics, persecution gradually 

113 H 



Religious Liberty 



became more open, and in 1680 the Dragon- 
nades of Marillac made life intolerable for 
Huguenots. Dragoons quartered in the houses 
of heretics flogged the men and dragged the 
women of the family by the hair to church. 
Five years later the Revocation was complete. 
Protestants were interdicted from the practice 
of their cult ; their children were to be baptized 
and their sick to receive sacraments by com- 
pulsion ; they were forbidden to employ 
Catholic servants, debarred from being lawyers, 
printers or librarians, and prevented from keep- 
ing lodgings or inns. Their temples were de- 
molished, and their dead accorded no Christian 
sepulture. By the intellectual ecclesiastics, no 
pity was shown for the oppressed sect. Bossuet 
assisted in organising the persecution, Massillon 
approved of it, and Fenelon, whom some people 
have wished to enrol among the tolerants, wrote 
from La Rochelle in 1685 : "Je ne trouve 
presque plus de religionnaires a La Rochelle 
depuis que je paye ceux qui me les decouvrent. 
. . . Je fais emprisonner les hommes et mettre 
les femmes et les iilles dans les couvents de 
Taveu et par Fautorite de Teveque." 

Though the death of Louis XIV. introduced 
"4 



Religious Liberty 



an interlude in persecution, when Dubois came 
to be Cardinal de Gesvres, prime minister, and 
head of the General Assembly of 1723, the 
cruellest laws against the Protestants were made 
once again effective. 

The manner in which the Church endeavoured 
to crush Rationalism in France is as memorable 
as her effort to extirpate Protestantism. With 
familiar assurance she entered into conflict with 
the intellectual forces of the day. She greeted 
the appearance of the Great Encyclopaedia with 
a condemnatory storm of books and pamphlets, 
and at her instigation the aims of the philo- 
sophers were travestied upon the stage. In 
1758 the clergy fitted the suppression of the 
Encyclopaedia, as they had f^ted the Revocation 
of the Edict of Nantes long years before. 
Another type of ecclesiastical power is instanced 
by the trial of de La Barre. Twenty-three 
years before the fall of the Bastille, a crucifix 
hanging on the bridge at Abbeville was found 
one morning mutilated. The Bishop of Amiens 
and his clergy came down to inquire into the 
matter, and since no one knew who was re- 
sponsible for the outrage, two young men^ 
reported to hold advanced opinions and to sing 

"5 



Religious Liberty 



ribald songs — the Chevalier de La Barre and 
M. d'E talon de — were chosen to expiate the 
crime. The judges declared that they were 
" v6h6mentement soup^onn6s d*avoir mutil6 le 
crucifix," and as punishment condemned them 
to lose their right wrists, to have their tongues 
torn out, their heads cut off, and their bodies 
burnt. Into the pile were to be thrown the 
" Dictionnaire philosophique '* and other new 
works. D'Etalonde fled, and on Voltaire's 
letter of introduction took service with the 
King of Prussia. De la Barre, inflexibly brave 
and only eighteen, suffered the penalties enume- 
rated. 

Both Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists have 
had recognition of men for the share which 
they took in destroying the prestige of the 
Church. Undoubtedly their work and influ- 
ence were both serious and important; but 
beneath the philosophers and their works ot 
light other nameless powers were striving 
toward enfranchisement. An attempt has been 
made in a previous essay to describe the extensive 
and intensive influence of the secret societies 
in France during the eighteenth century. 
The appeal of the Encyclopaedists was to the 

ii6 



Religious Liberty 



educated, but the secret societies made their 
appeal to the uneducated and the poor, who 
were not for their ignorance or poverty debarred 
from comprehending the great belief, which 
inspired nearly all the mystical societies of the 
Middle Ages and modern days, the belief in 
the divinity of man and in the true brotherhood 
and unity of humanity symbolised in the triple 
watchword of the Martinists, '* Liberty, Frater- 
nity, Equality." Men have banded themselves 
together in all ages in order to attack tyranny 
by destroying the idolatrous esteem in which it 
was held ; for the effort to emancipate the 
human race and enable it to grow to the full 
stature of its manhood is an ancient endeavour, 
a divine fever laying hold of mystics, peasants, 
quakers, poets, theosophists, and all who cannot 
accustom themselves to the ugly inequalities of 
social life. Although nowadays men can further 
such ends openly, in other centuries they had 
to work stealthily in clandestine ways, and the 
generations of victims and martyrs who lie in 
the catacombs of feudalism could attest the 
danger of their enterprise. How many men 
have died in chains, how many crypts have 
concealed nameless cruelties from the sunlight, 
117 



Religious Liberty 



how many redeemers have sacrificed the dear 
gift of life that tyrannies might cease, no man 
can tell; but without that secret soul of progress, 
formed deep below the consciousness of political 
thought and action, history would have been 
but a monotonous record of military and 
monachal despotism. 

It has been thought strange that a powerful 
organisation like the Church fell so easily before 
the innovators. The secret societies, however, 
with their enthusiasm for humanity, were 
greatly responsible for the Church's temporary 
discomfiture, though they could not hold the 
advantage gained, since they had no definite 
new religion to substitute for the old creed. 
The reformers, realising that the only efficient 
destruction is reconstruction, made sundry at- 
tempts at civic and secular religion, which all 
proved too cold and unattractive to compete 
successfully with the warm humanity and 
familiar pageants of the Church's feasts. 

Long before the outbreak of the Revolution, 
the banners of secret societies working for the 
good of humanity bore the words : " Down 
with the double despotism of Priests and 
Kings," and in every important town in France, 

ii8 



Religious Liberty 



as well as in many country districts, were to 
be found bands of men professing the new faith 
of brotherhood. Ecclesiastical edicts of the 
eighteenth century witness to the existence and 
spread of workmen's unions. Fraternal societies, 
admitting members of both sexes, met in country 
districts, and discussed the problems of the 
people. A network of freemasonry had been 
successfully established over the greater part of 
France a few years before the outbreak of the 
Revolution. That strong views were held on 
brotherhood by masons and members of other 
secret societies may be gathered from the terms 
of their members* obligation : " I, with all the 
possessions, rank, honours and titles which I 
hold in political society, am only a man. I 
enjoy these things only through my fellow men, 
and through them also I may lose them. . . . 
I will oppose with all my might the enemies of 
the human race and of liberty." 

Rousseau was a mason, and so was Mirabeau, 
the conqueror of the Church. The latter in- 
ducted the Bishop of Autun into the society, 
as well as the Duke of Orleans, who was said in 
his alchemistical experiments in the garrets of 
the Palais Royal to have destroyed Pascal's 

119 



Religious Liberty 



skeleton in his crucibles. Sieyes, the first clerical 
member of the Third Estate, belonged to a 
secret society, and so did Dom Gerle, the well- 
known Carthusian who sat in the Assembly. 
An enthusiasm for Humanity — "the Supreme 
Being," was the flame that burnt in the breast 
of every member of the great secret service. 
All the fervour and feeling of which men are 
capable were needed in France in 1789 to 
combat the gross indifference to human suffer- 
ing, the infliction of unbearable existences upon 
the innocent and weak, the maladministration 
of public institutions and public charities. It 
was enough to break the courage of most men, 
and to crack the heart-strings of the rest, to 
see such spurning of human life, such despising 
and rejecting of the diviner qualities of men. 
The task of making man respect man seemed 
insurmountable, but through shedding of blood 
it was accomplished. 

Extracts from official reports* of the time 
serve to show that there was good excuse for 
reforming the domestic administration of both 
Church and State. In 1772 a fire at the 
Hotel- Dieu in Paris revealed the nature of 
* " Le Mouvement Religieux a Paris," Robinet. 
120 



Religious Liberty 



institutional charity. One of the wards, the 
Salle S. Charles, contained four rows of beds, a 
hundred and one big ones and nine small ones. 
On January 6, 1786, this room held three 
hundred and forty sick people, and at a pinch 
six hundred and fifteen were packed into it. 
The Royal Commission appointed to investi- 
gate into hospital management in that year 
reported that the dead were mingled with the 
living, that every kind of illness was crowded 
together, and that*^ beds 4 ft. 4 in. wide con- 
tained four to six invalids, heads and feet 
alternating, all unable to move or sleep. Other 
unquotable details are mentioned in the report. 
At Bic^tre, women were chained in dark sub- 
terranean dungeons, whither rats came in hordes 
and gnawed their feet. In the quiet of the 
night inhabitants of the district were awaked 
from peaceful slumbers by a sound of wailing, 
which was audible for more than a mile. For 
years those who heard it paid no more attention 
to it than men do nowadays to the noise of 
a passing train. They alluded to it as the 
*'plainte de I'hopital," though it was a device 
by which hundreds of human beings howling in 
unison hoped to draw attention to the piteous- 

121 



Religious Liberty 



ness of their condition. In the debtors* prisons 
disgusting usages prevailed ; men and women 
were imprisoned promiscuously in the same 
cells, and the straw that was the only furniture 
of their prison remained for weeks unchanged. 

Thus under the old regime were charity and 
justice travestied and made into a mockery. 
Turgot, Beccaria and Condorcet, not the clergy, 
had lifted up their voices in protest against 
these infamies; D'Holbach, Diderot and Nai- 
geon had been so maddened by them as to 
declare that " Catholicism was a religion for 
barbarians.'* Behind the silent walls of asylums, 
hospitals, and prisons the hideous work of 
spreading disease, corruption and death went 
on in the name of Christ and in the name of 
the King. 

It is one of the marvels of that marvellous 
epoch that in the midst of such abuses the 
outraged people of France were moderate 
enough in the first days of the great social 
upheaval to attack ecclesiastical abuses only, 
but never the Christian religion. It is also 
worth remembering that the French Revolution 
was initiated by the " Veni Creator," as it was 
concluded by the "Te Deum." In the late 

122 



Religious Liberty 



spring of 1789 the procession of the Estates, 
after singing the "Veni Creator," passed out 
of the cathedral at Versailles to the church of 
S. Louis to assist at a Mass of the Holy Ghost, 
and to listen to a sermon on religion as con- 
tributing to the happiness of nations. Thirteen 
years later, after rivers of blood had flowed and 
all the sanctuaries had been defiled, another 
procession passed through the streets of Paris 
to sing a " Te Deum " at Notre-Dame, and to 
assist at a Mass in celebration of the remarriage 
of a Church and State that had been eight 
years divorced. 

To describe a movement unguided by any 
commanding personality, and unmapped by 
definite plans of progress, is perhaps less in- 
teresting than to describe the influence of a 
Cromwell or a Luther. The religious con- 
flicts of the Revolution more resemble a sea 
of contrary waves, beating as it were unmean- 
ingly against each other, than a strong and 
swelling tide of reform overwhelming France. 
The voices that sound clear above the tumult 
are very few. It is vain to listen for a 
dominant note in the speeches of the orthodox 
churchmen of the day, for they were powerless 

123 



Religious Liberty 



to sway opinion or control the march of pro- 
gress. Abb6 Maury, who opposed Mirabeau 
on the question of Church privileges in 
the Constituent Assembly, and M. Emery, 
principal of Saint-Sulpice Seminary, who, 
though he took no part in politics, was re- 
nowned for piety and wisdom, were the two 
most notable servants of the Church. In the 
ranks of the revolutionaries there were several 
distinguished ecclesiastics. Abbe Fauchet, in 
bullet-torn cassock, preached a funeral sermon 
over the dead stormers of the Bastille, and 
passionately cried : " Liberty is no longer 
Caesar's, it belongs to human nature ! '* He 
blessed the colours of the citizen soldiers, and 
was called by Madame Roland " that best of 
revolutionaries." Though he served as presi- 
dent of police and commune, he eventually 
went to the scaffold for his faith. Sieyes, the 
Sulpician, wrote the famous pamphlet, " Qu'est- 
ce que le Tiers-Etat/* which had a prodigious 
circulation in the beginning of the year 1789 
and which directed the career of the Third 
Estate at Versailles. Not only did its author 
assist to frame the " Civil Constitution of the 
Clergy" in 1 790, but he helped to draw up 

124 



Religious Liberty 



the Concordat of 1802. Both Sieyes and 
Talleyrand lived to hold high secular posts of 
State, and the latter, as is well known, took an 
important part in the debates of the Constituent 
Assembly, and was responsible for broaching 
the scheme of Church disendowment. But 
perhaps the noblest, if not the ablest, of the 
clerics was Cure Gregoire, who firmly believed 
in Christianity and in the mission of the 
Constitutional Church, and who, throughout 
the Terror, when to be a priest meant death, 
wore the violet robe and cross both in the 
Assembly and in the street. 

All the reformers, lay and clerical, were fired 
by principles and ideals ; few had any plans 
for translating them into fact ; so the study of 
their empirical efforts after justice provokes 
something like despair. A clause dealing with 
freedom of conscience and worship was easily 
and swiftly embodied in the Declaration of 
Rights, but the men were scarce who realised 
how hard and slow a task would prove the 
establishment of such liberty. 

The opinion of the country on the Church 
was represented in the " cahiers des dol^ances," 
prepared for the States-General in 1789. 

125 



Religious Liberty 



Strictly speaking, there was no religious ques- 
tion in them, for they dealt, not with dogma or 
rite, but with discipline. The " cahiers " of the 
First Estate demanded that regulars should be 
forced to fulfil their earlier and more strenuous 
obligation, while the " cahiers " of the Third 
Estate denounced the archbishops, bishops, and 
regulars as ** idle, vicious, and wealthy," but 
were unanimous in their praise of the parish 
priest. A letter illustrative of the state of 
affairs in country districts is that of Abbe 
Mesmiont to Cardinal Ludovisi : 

" I do all that I can [speaking of the 
peasants] to contribute to their well-being, a 
few of the neighbouring gentry second my 
efforts, but these efforts are expended in vain ; 
three abbeys, a commandery, and several 
priories seize all the resources of the poor . . . 
the useless clergy are but a dead tree that 
should be cut down — a parasitic, greedy 
growth, fit only to be lopped.'' 

During the memorable August night when 
feudal privileges were abdicated in a blaze of 
emotion by the aristocrats, the clergy, carried 
away by the inspiration of the hour, volunteered 

126 



Religions Liberty 



to sacrifice plurality of benefices, annates, and 
other privileges to the nation. Not till some 
days afterwards did they realise the gravity of 
the step they had taken in making the hitherto 
unquestioned privileges of the Church a matter 
debatable by the people in the National 
Assembly. Without reflection they had opened 
the door to disendowment, and had tacitly 
admitted that their position was dependent on 
the nation's will. Though neither Mirabeau 
nor Sieyes was present on the great night, they 
both took a conspicuous part in the subsequent 
debate on tithes, and Mirabeau was quick to 
see the advantage given by the clergy and to use 
it in a speech wherein he proved that tithes 
were not property, but a contribution from the 
nation to that branch of the public service 
which was concerned with the ministers of her 
altars, a mere " subsidy by means of which the 
nation salaried its officers of morality.'' The 
peasants, imploring to be delivered from the 
great burden of tithes, had forced this early 
consideration of the problem on the ilssembly. 
In spite of Arthur Young's observations to the 
contrary, great abuses were connected with 
tithe-gathering in the provinces, the demands 

127 



Religious Liberty 



of the gatherers were not always limited to the 
legal tenth ; sometimes a sixth, and even a 
fourth, was wrested from the unfortunate and 
defenceless cultivator. In one of the " cahiers '* 
the tithes are alluded to as " ces sangsues 
accablantes." 

The majority of prelates were not in favour 
of throwing away 70,000,000 livres. " What ! " 
exclaimed a priest in the Assembly, ** when you 
invited us to come and join you, in the name 
of the God of Peace, was it to cut our throats ? " 
Siey^s spoke against confiscation, but was in 
favour of replacing tithes by some other means 
of payment. In spite of all protests, de Juigne, 
Archbishop of Paris, rose and closed the debate 
by renouncing in the name of the French clergy 
all claim to tithes. From this abrogation the 
logical step to complete disendowment and the 
conversion of the Church into a salaried depart- 
ment of the State was small. Affairs moved 
rapidly ; a few days later a committee was 
appointed to inquire into methods of ecclesias- 
tical reform. A month afterwards, when some 
one in the Assembly rose during a debate on 
taxation and suggested that the Church should be 
asked to sacrifice her plate, Mirabeau declared 

128 



Religious Liberty 



" that treasures accumulated by the piety of 
ancestors would not change their religious des- 
tination by issuing forth from obscurity into the 
service of the country." To every one's surprise 
de Juigne declared that the clergy were ready to 
abandon all treasure that was not necessary to 
the ceremonies of the Church. The clerical 
policy of disarming the Assembly by unexpected 
generosity, in order to evade a discussion on 
the Church's property and the titles under which 
she held about one-fifth of the land of France, 
did not prove a success. Mirabeau, who did 
not wish to place the State under obligation 
to the hierarchy, asserted that the property of 
the Church was by nature the property of the 
nation, and therefore that it was not possible 
for the clergy to make any sacrifice. He fully 
realised the probable feebleness in debate of 
those whose authority had hitherto been undis- 
puted ; their uncertainty as to the titles under 
which the Church collected, held, and adminis- 
tered her funds, as well as their inability to 
prove the legality of their ancient monopolies. 
Dupont de Nemours, a deputy, drew up a table 
of the clergy's debt to the State since 1706, 
and argued that since the Church enjoyed her 

129 2 



Religious Liberty 



property under certain conditions, those, if not 
fulfilled, caused her to forfeit all claim over it. 
He proved, for example, that a milliard masses 
could not be said by sixty thousand priests, and 
gave other instances of the Church's want of 
good faith. On October ii the Bishop of 
Autun formally proposed that the property of 
the Church should be henceforth the property 
of the nation. A violent discussion followed, 
which lasted till November 2. The press bristled 
with arguments, and sheaves of pamphlets were 
sent to every deputy. Mirabeau, by far the 
most able member of the Assembly, carried 
the people with him, partly by his magnificent 
oratory and partly by his clear and easily 
followed arguments. He appealed to common 
sense, and argued that the living should not be 
fettered by the dead : "Si tous les hommes 
qui aient vecu avaient eu un tombeau, il 
aurait bien fallu, pour trouver des terres \ 
cultiver, renverser ces monuments steriles, et 
remuer les cendres des morts pour nourrir les 
vivants." 

His main opponent was Abbe Maury, and 
the two men were supposed by the public of 
the day to resemble each other : 

130 



Religious Liberty 



Deux insignes chefs de parti 
D*intrigue ici tiennent bureau ; 
Chacun \ Tautre est assort! : 
M6me audace et front de taureau. 

L'on pourrait faire le pari 
Qu'ils sont nes de la meme peau, 
Car, retournez abe Mauri, 
Vous y retrouverez Mirabeau. 

Mirabeau carried the vote of the Assembly in 
his closing speech, when he argued that the 
clergy accumulated wealth, not for themselves 
as a corporation, but for the benefit of the 
nation, and proved that the property of the 
Church was in all points identical with that of 
the Crown. The terms of the motion ran as 
follows : 

" I®. Tous les biens ecclesiastiques sont a la 
disposition de la nation, a la charge de pourvoir 
d'une maniere convenable aux frais du culte, a 
Pentretien de ses ministres et au soulagement 
des pauvres, sous la surveillance et d*apres les 
instructions des provinces. 

" 2", Dans les dispositions a faire pour 
Tentretien des ministres de la religion, il ne 
pourra etre assure a la dotation d'aucun 
cure moins de douze cent livres par annee, 

131 



Religious Liberty 



non compris le logement et les jardins en 
dependant." * 

The minimum annual provision of twelve 
hundred livres for cures was generous, since 
under the old regime many country clergy had 
enjoyed but half or three-quarters of that sum. 
There can be no question but that the Assembly 
meant to deal honestly with the revenues which 
it had taken upon itself to administer. The 
fact that this administration proved a com- 
plete failure does not incriminate the original 
intention. In all ages the road to anarchy has 
been paved with good intentions. 

The problem of how to deal with monastic 
foundations arose out of the transference of 
ecclesiastical properties to State ownership, and 
in December Deputy Treilhaud made his report 
to the Assembly on the Religious Orders. The 
eighteenth century cannot be called the age of 
faith, and investigation into the habits of 
religious societies was sure to be productive of 
unedifying disclosures. Moreover, since the 
legal age for pronouncing vows had been raised 
from sixteen to twenty-one, the monasteries of 
France had been gradually emptying. A few 

* "Histoire de M. i^mery," p. 115. 
132 



Religious Liberty 



instances will show the numerical decrease of 
the inhabitants of religious houses in the country. 
The community of the Benedictine Abbey of 
Bennaye was reduced from fifty inmates to four ; 
that of Bec-Helluin, built for eighty inmates, 
was reduced to nineteen ; while the Couvent 
des Deux Am ants contained but the prior and 
one monk. Discipline was everywhere greatly 
relaxed, and many houses had acquired a 
most discreditable reputation. The ecclesiastical 
prisons of Paris were said to be worse than the 
Bastille, and it was rumoured that dozens of 
victims languished in their " in pace " cells. 
The decision of the Assembly not to recognise 
monastic vows as binding on man or woman, 
" because they were another term for civic 
suicide," was the means of revealing that almost 
every convent contained unwilling, restless 
inmates. A decree was promulgated throughout 
France allowing all monks and nuns other than 
those engaged in nursing the sick or instructing 
the young, to make a declaration before the 
appointed civil authority, and on quitting their 
special habit to receive a pension. In one 
monastery of two hundred and seventy-four 
monks all but seventy-nine became citizens ; in 

133 



Religious Liberty 



another, twenty-seven out of eighty -four re- 
entered the world; in a large convent at 
Besangon nineteen women out of three hundred 
and fifty-eight desired to abjure their vows.* 

No exact record of the number of religious in 
1789 can be obtained. It has been roughly 
estimated at 60,000, and is supposed numerically 
to have balanced the number of secular priests. 
Equally uncertain is the value of the property 
of the Church at that date. The ecclesiastical 
accounts, prepared at the beginning of the 
Revolution for the public records, do not 
probably give a true version of capital and 
income. The annual value of the sequestered 
wealth of the Church has been approximately 
assessed at 180,000,000 livres, inclusive of 
tithes, but exclusive of alms and casual charity. 

The Assembly encountered strenuous opposi- 
tion in its endeavour to set in motion the 
secular administration of ecclesiastical funds. 
The committee which had been appointed in 
August 1789 to inquire into methods of Church 
reform presented its report in April 1790. The 
report dealt entirely with questions of discipline 
and with remedies for old and obvious abuses. 
^ Sciout," Constitution Civile du Clerg6," vol. i. p. 292, 
134 



Religious Liberty 



It was proposed, for instance, that there should 
be a redistribution of parishes and dioceses, 
corresponding to the new departmental divisions 
of France ; that a table of priests and chapels 
necessary to serve the people should be drawn 
up with some reference to the population of the 
districts ; that priests should be elected, not 
nominated ; that their salaries and residences 
should be fixed ; and that they should be under 
the supervision of municipal authorities. The 
committee proved itself pathetically anxious to 
fall into no heresy, and Camus, the hero of the 
debate on the report, endeavoured to prove by 
synodal decrees of the fourth century the exact 
agreement of the new proposals for Church 
discipline with the letter of the New Testament. 
Monsignor Meric, the biographer of M. Emery, 
speaks of the work of the diligent and timid 
committee as " les deliberations haineuses . . . 
les arguties miserables de la plus mauvaise 
theologie . . . une violente attaque contre 
I'Eglise." 

At the end of May the report was adopted 
and, with a few corrections, became the Civil 
Constitution of the Clergy. The King delayed 
appending his signature to the new measure as 

135 



Religious Liberty 



long as he dared, and on July 28, when he saw 
the limit of his resistance approaching, he wrote 
to warn the Pope of his approaching capitula- 
tion : " Votre Saintete sent mieux que personne 
combien il importe de conserver les nceuds qui 
unissent la France au Saint-Si^ge. Elle ne 
mettra pas en doute que I'interet le plus puissant 
de la religion, dans la situation presente des 
affaires, ne soit de prevenir une division funeste." 
On August 24 the King yielded to the pressure 
of the Constituent Assembly, and by his signa- 
ture made the measure law. Meanwhile the 
Pope, though retarding for many months his 
official declaration of opinion, privately recom- 
mended resistance to all the bishops of France, 
and instructed them to suffer all things rather 
than yield to the demands of the Civil 
Constitution. 

Some reformers thought that Mirabeau and 
Talleyrand had moved too fast in making 
implacable enemies of all churchmen, and many 
men in France agreed with Abbe Maury and 
his friend, M. Emery, that the confiscation of 
Church property was criminal spoliation. Many 
members of the Assembly had been earnestly 
opposed to the decrees confiscating the property 

136 



Religious Liberty 



of the Church and of religious orders, and it 
was obvious that the innovators would have to 
contend with wide-spread hostility. 

In order to test the adherents of reform, the 
Assembly, after much argument, made it com- 
pulsory for all clergy to swear to support the 
new Constitution. Very reluctantly the King 
was forced into signing this second edict. Cari- 
catures of the King with two faces were sold in 
the gutters of Paris : one face said to a bishop, 
*' I will destroy the Constitution " ; and the 
other said to a member of the Assembly, *' I 
will uphold the Constitution." 

Two days after Christmas the business of 
swearing fidelity to the new Act was begun in 
the Assembly. Cure Gregoire, who later be- 
came a constitutional bishop, was the first to 
take the oath; and, speaking for himself and 
for the fifty-nine priests who accompanied him, 
and who included in their ranks Dom Gerle, 
he said : " Apres le plus mur, le plus serieux 
examen, nous declarons ne rien apercevoir dans 
la Constitution Civile du Clerge qui puisse 
blesser les verites saintes que nous devons croire 
et enseigner.'* It is interesting to note that 
Gregoire, unlike others, did not retract this 



Religious Liberty 



opinion in dying, for, when pressed by a priest 
to renounce his earlier heresy, he said : '' Jeune 
homme, ce n'est pas sans examen que j'ai prete 
serment, ce n*est pas sans de serieuses medita- 
tions au pied de la croix que j*ai accepte Tepis- 
copat." Talleyrand and Gobel, names sinister in 
Catholic annals, took the oath on December 28 
and January 2 respectively. On January 3 
twenty-three cures, members of the Assembly, 
sealed their adherence to the new decree, and 
on the 4th, Barnave having moved that all 
ecclesiastical members of the Assembly be asked 
to conform, and that in the event of refusal 
they should be replaced by jurors, an appeal by 
name to the clerical deputies was made in alpha- 
betical order. M. de Bonnac, Bishop of Agen, 
was the first called. He replied : " Messieurs, 
les sacrifices de la fortune me coutent peu ; mais 
il en est un que je ne saurais faire, celui de 
votre estime et de ma foi ; je serais trop sur de 
fondre Tune et I'autre, si je pr6tais le serment 
qu'on exige de moi.'* * After two bishops and 
three priests had refused the oath, and four 
had taken it, the President caused the nominal 
appeal to cease, and asked the ecclesiastics col- 
* " Histoire de M. ifimery," p. 153. 
138 



Religions Liberty 



lectively whether there were any among them 
who would consent to be sworn. All except 
the four mentioned refused, and Catholics speak 
with intense pride of the courage of their 
deputies on this occasion. M. Emery called 
it " the triumph day of the Church in France," 
and wished to perpetuate its memory by an 
anniversary. Mirabeau, who considered the 
motion the great tactical mistake it proved 
itself to be, moved, however, that the second 
part be adopted. This was carried by a large 
majority. Thus was persecution inaugurated 
against the Church, and the sacred principle of 
liberty denied by its apostles. 

The second and third Sundays of the new 
year were the days appointed for the Govern- 
ment agents to exact the oath of fidelity from 
the parish priests of Paris. It had been decided, 
in order not to dislocate the services of the 
Church, that non-jurors should continue to 
practise until replaced by jurors. The agents 
visited many deserted churches from which the 
cures had disappeared; but at Saint- Sulpice 
they found twenty-six assenting priests, and at 
Saint-Germain-PAuxerrois three. The result 
of this test could not have been encouraging to 

139 



Religious Liberty 



the authorities, since but forty priests in all 
conformed.* In the country the visits of the 
Government emissaries to administer the oath 
were met with varying results. In the depart- 
ment of Doubs only four out of four hundred 
and ninety took the oath ; in the diocese of 
Besan^on nine hundred and seven gave in their 
allegiance to the Constitution ; in the district 
of Valenciennes, four conformed and one hun- 
dred and twenty-six refused. t Corsica became 
riotous at the new enactment, as did La Vendee. 
The Assembly, which had not anticipated serious 
opposition to its scheme of Church administra- 
tion, received the provincial reports with deep 
disappointment. But it having been decided 
to pension all non-juring priests, the Govern- 
ment proceeded immediately to set in motion 
the elections that were to fill the vacancies 
created by their eviction. Recruits were hastily 
collected from the ranks of lay brothers, beadles, 
and choristers, and were often ordained after a 
few weeks' training. Since but five bishops out 
of one hundred and twenty-one had accepted 

* " Le Mouvement Religleux a Paris pendant la Revolu- 
tion," vol. i. p. 387. 

t Sciout, "Constitution Civile du Clerg^," vol. ii. p. 93. 
140 



ReligioiLS Liberty 



the Constitution, it was necessary to consecrate 
others. Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, assisted 
by Gobel, Bishop of Lydda, and Miroudot, 
Bishop of Babylon, proceeded with the conse- 
cration of the priests elected to fill up the 
vacant bishoprics. One of the seminarists of 
Saint- Sulpice, who attended the ceremony in 
L'Eglise de TOratoire, notes that Talleyrand 
followed the Roman Pontifical, omitting only 
the reading of the Bulls and the oath of fidelity 
to the Pope. Gobel, who was elected as 
Metropolitan of Paris, was inducted into his 
see on Wednesday, March 30; and the new 
cures, who were nicknamed '' juraciers," were 
installed on Passion Sunday, April 3. In the 
later spring of 1791 arrived the long-delayed 
decision of the Pope on the Civil Constitution, 
embodied in two encyclicals. The Papal 
Internuncio, Salamon, who kept interesting 
memoirs of his experiences, delivered both 
encyclicals secretly to the Metropolitans of 
France. The earlier brief criticised the conse- 
cration of the new bishops by Talleyrand as 
having excluded the oath of loyalty to the 
Pope, the examination of the elected, and the 
professions of faith. It therefore declared all 

141 



Religious Liberty 



such elections and consecrations null. The 
later brief was publicly burnt in the Place 
Royale, and soon afterwards an effigy of 
Pius VI., "I'ogre du Tibre," as it was nick- 
named, dressed in full canonicals and holding 
the two briefs in its hand, its head encircled by 
a band bearing the word " Feudalism,*' and its 
body by another bearing the words *' Civil 
War," was the centre of a big bonfire. Before 
burning the effigy, the promoters of the spectacle 
removed the cross and the ring from the figure 
as being " symbols worthy of all honour.'* 

Easter, 1791, was a day of trial for the 
faithful ; though the King had endorsed and 
officially approved the State Church, he was 
prevented by his conscience from really partici- 
pating in its services. Since his confessor had 
taken the oath he went privately to a Jesuit for 
his confession, and received communion from 
Cardinal Montmorency in the chapel of the 
Tuileries. Paris was in an uproar when it heard 
of this breach of the Constitution, and a notice 
was posted by the clubs to the following effect : 

*^ La societe, sur la denonciation a elle faite 
que Ic premier fonctionnaire public de la nation 

142 



Religious Liberty 



permet que des pr^tres refractaires se retirent 
dans sa maison et y exercent publiquement, au 
scandale des Fran^ais et de la loi, des fonctions 
publlques qui sont interdites par elle ; qu'il a 
meme regu aujourd'hui la communion pascale et 
entendu la messe d'un des pretres refractaires, 
elle denonce aux representants de la nation ce 
premier sujet de la loi, comme refractaire aux 
lois constitutionnelles." 

Many juring priests, on learning their con- 
demnation by the Pope, retracted their oath and 
made their peace with the orthodox clergy. The 
clubs urged that strong measures should be en- 
forced against refractories, but in spite of their 
protests the Constituent Assembly throughout 
its session endeavoured to realise the ideal of 
tolerance, and solemnly persevered in its attempt 
to reconcile opposites by establishing a dominant 
Church while adhering to the spirit of the clause 
on religious liberty in the Declaration of Rights. 
It decreed that the freedom of non-jurors should 
be respected, and that they should have such 
churches for their use as were not already 
appropriated by the State. At the same time 
it encouraged the Constitutional Church to give 

H3 



Religious Liberty 



examples of its efficiency. A band of children 
who had received their first communion at the 
hand of Gobel, the new Metropolitan, were 
paraded through Paris and received by the 
Assembly as the first-fruits of the State Church. 
Further to promote and popularise the ideal ot 
tolerance, the Assembly organised a public funeral 
at the Pantheon in honour of the Apostle of 
Tolerance — Voltaire. He had been buried at a 
country abbey thirteen years earlier, after a 
service had been held over his body in the 
Masonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters at Paris, 
and it was thought fitting that he should be 
re-interred in the Temple of the Nation. 
Triumphal arches, levelled roads, and in- 
terested crowds awaited the cortege. Women 
touched the hearse with kerchiefs and kept them 
long afterwards as relics. Arrived on the site 
of the old Bastille, where Voltaire himself had 
suffered several periods of detention, the coffin 
rested for the night in a grove of roses, myrtles 
and laurels, in the midst of which the old stones 
of the prison walls were disposed as rocks. The 
next morning representatives of the sections, 
clubs, and municipality of Paris came in bands 
to escort the ashes to their final resting-place. 

144 



Religious Liberty 



The efforts, however, of the Constituent 
Assembly towards actualising religious tolera- 
tion were doomed to failure ; fanatical passions 
had been aroused which no Government could 
control. The outcome of the Assembly's 
ecclesiastical policy had been to consolidate the 
d^rgy and the faithful into a determined oppo- 
sition to reform. The private chapels of hos- 
pitals and convents became the meeting-places 
of conspirators, and the whole orthodox Church 
was leagued against all plans of reorganisation. 
Much bitter feeling was engendered in the 
breasts of the departmental officials, and France 
lapsed automatically into the state of sporadic 
civil war which culminated in the rising in 
La Vendee. Exasperated by this resistance, 
the Government cancelled the decree adjudi- 
cating pensions to non-conformists, and during 
the last months of the Constituent Assembly's 
session persecutions, unsanctioned by its decrees, 
became the common practice. Non-conformists 
were driven to celebrate their rites in barns and 
private houses and were not allowed openly to 
administer any of the sacraments. Fights over 
the bodies of the dead took place, and often, in 
ispite of the protests of relations, corpses were 



Religious Liberty 



torn out of coffins to be buried by conformist 
clergy. According to the sympathies of the 
district, one party or the other was violently 
championed ; a juror was shot in the pulpit 
of one church and a non-juror hanged to the 
chancel lamp of another. To avoid death, 
priests emigrated in thousands. Gregoire says 
that by 1792, 18,000 had fled, and after that 
date quite as many more followed them. About 
4000 took refuge in England, 700 of whom 
were lodged by Government at Winchester. 
Many delightful stories of the generosity of the 
English to the penniless priests are told by 
Gregoire in his " Memoirs." 

When the summer was over, the Constituent 
Assembly, while prohibiting its members from 
seeking election to the new body, transmitted 
its powers to the Legislative Assembly, together 
with a number of ecclesiastical Gordian knots, 
which the new Government, with Alexandrian 
promptness, proceeded to sever. The Legisla- 
tive Assembly as a whole was hostile to the 
Church. The brilliant deputies from the 
Gironde, as well as the men of the Mountain, 
were non-Christian, and many of the younger 
members had been gathered from administrative 
146 



Religious Liberty 



posts in the departments, where they had learnt 
to regard the Church as the chief enemy of the 
Revolution. They knew that feeling against 
the Civil Constitution was being particularly 
fomented in country districts by two religious 
orders, which had not come under the ban of 
the Constituent Assembly, the missionaries of 
Saint Laurent, who were peculiarly active in 
counselling opposition to the new Church, and 
the Soeurs de la Sagesse, who, though useful as 
nurses, were said to inculcate seditious teaching 
against the Government. Many priests, ac- 
cording to an official report from Meaux,* told 
women that it was better to strangle their 
babies at birth than to let them be baptized by a 
*^juracier." The Bishop of Langres exhorted 
the priests in his diocese to hold meetings 
secretly in which they should explain to the 
faithful the horror in which conformists should 
be held. Some " intrus " country clergy begged 
to be allowed to live in towns and make expe- 
ditions to their parishes, since the agriculturists 
were so hostile to them. 

Besides legalising priestly marriage in the con- 

* " Le Mouvement Religieux a Paris pendant la Revolu- 
tion," vol. ii. p. 131. 

147 



Religious Liberty 



stitutional Church, a question much debated in 
the Constituent Assembly, the new Government 
passed a very important measure, enforcing the 
civil registration of births, deaths, and marriages, 
a reform which had been made law in England 
under the Commonwealth. By this decree, 
it was demonstrated to all that the approval 
of the Church was not necessary to the founda- 
tion of families, as it had been in centuries past, 
when Huguenots had no existence in the eyes of 
the law. By this measure the phantoms of old 
indignities and injustices were laid for ever. 

In spite of the fact that the Civil Constitution 
had proved a failure, the Legislative Assembly did 
not renounce the hope of making it a success. 
Many people thought this hope futile. Andre 
Chenier, who was eager to separate Church and 
State completely, expressed his views in the 
'' Moniteur." Ramond, in the Assembly, pro- 
posed that all cults should be subsidised by the 
State, the plan afterwards adopted by Napoleon, 
but the Assembly, determined to make one more 
effort to conciliate the clergy and strengthen 
the State Church, listened to none of these 
suggestions. By altering the oath of loyalty to 
the Civil Constitution into a promise to support 
148 



Religious Liberty 



" les rapports civils et les regies exterieures du 
culte catholique en France," and by ordaining 
that bishops and priests were no longer to be 
called public functionaries, a bid was made for 
fresh adherents. All the clergy who refused the 
revised oath were to be charged with revolt, 
and made liable to punishment. According to 
" Les Annales Catholiques," many non-juring 
clergy thought it only right that they should 
plight themselves to nation, law, and king, 
and saw in it a great difference from the old 
oath of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 
though, as a matter of fact, the verbal alteration 
made no difference to the intention of the 
pledge, which was designed to attract thq sup- 
port of Catholics to a schismatic Constitution. 
Many celebrated congregations, however, ac- 
cepted it without demur, amongst them those 
of Saint-Lazare, I'Oratoire, Saint-Sulpice, and 
La Doctrine Chretienne, as well as nearly all 
the unemigrated clergy of the capital. After 
long meditation, M. Emery advised those who 
consulted him to take it ; he thought it lawful 
and purely civil, and moreover he was anxious 
to save further priests from banishment. 

In making non-conformists legally punishable 
149 



Religious Liberty 



the Legislative Assembly were countenancing 
a promiscuous persecution which they were 
unable to regulate. A list of non-jurors was 
made out in Paris, and through the agency of 
the Jacobin party they were subjected to every 
kind of indignity. Convents were entered by 
force ; that of the Dominican nuns was raided, 
and when the superior of the school of S. Charles 
refused to admit a juring priest to its chapel 
roughs were employed to force the door and 
occupy the convent till the discomfited nuns 
had fled. Men in cassocks were insulted in the 
streets, and nuns flogged by the women of the 
Halles. The comic papers were filled with 
representations of these indecent adventurings. 

It was agreed during the winter that all 
religious bodies engaged in teaching and nursing 
should be suppressed ; and Sisters of Charity 
were discussed as if they were vermin to be 
exterminated. Roland, who became Minister 
of the Interior in 1792, had to execute the 
decision of the Assembly. He was known as 
a " pr^trophobe," and as such his accession to 
power was celebrated by his Jacobin supporters 
at Lyons by a scandalous invasion of oratories 
and convents. The suppression of educational 

150 



Religious Liberty 



communities included among many others the 
Sorbonne, which it is not uninteresting to note 
was dissolved just thirty years after it had con- 
demned ** Emile." It was found impossible to 
suppress the nursing orders altogether, but their 
" dangerous " activities were curtailed by submit- 
ting them to civil direction. Of the opposition 
and violent reprisals provoked by the execution of 
these decrees Roland rendered an account in the 
Legislative Assembly, endeavouring to justify 
local and illegal persecutions by saying of monks 
and nuns : ^' Tant qu'on laissera une libre 
carriere a leurs trames perfides, jamais la tran- 
quillite publique ne se retablira : Texperience, 
que est plus forte que tous les raisonnements, 
le prouve avec evidence. . . ." He acknow- 
ledged that forty-two departments had taken 
action in ways neither prescribed nor author- 
ised by the Constitution. He approved of a 
decree passed by the Assembly for the imme- 
diate deportation of priests as a " measure of 
public safety." * By this law non-conformists 
were penalised in one clause on being denounced 
by twenty citizens of the same ''canton," 
while in another they were made liable to 
* May 27, 1792. 
151 



Religious Liberty 



banishment if one or more active citizen of the 
department could prove that they had excited 
trouble by some exterior act. The King, in 
spite of Roland's insistence, exercised his privi- 
lege of vetoing a measure which it was popularly 
supposed would rid the country of 50,000 
priests, but he could not stem the flowing tide 
of feeling against the reactionaries. 

On June 7 the Fete Dieu processions took 
place. Juring and non-juring priests paraded 
in the rain and mud ; the juring processions 
were escorted by State functionaries, though 
when a downpour came on they could not get 
shelter, even for the Host, at a convent which 
they attempted to enter. The previous year 
the Constituent Assembly had assisted in the 
procession, and this year the Legislative As- 
sembly suspended its sitting, but did not attend 
officially. On June 20 the people, furious at 
the way M. Veto, as they called the King, 
had used his remainder of authority, invaded 
the Tuileries and crowned him with the red 
cap of liberty. Not two months later the 
people, impatient of the last shred of privi- 
lege, stormed the Tuileries in a fiercer mood 
and encountered the brave Swiss guards, while 

152 



Religious Liberty 



M. Veto himself took refuge in the steno- 
grapher's box in the Assembly. The mob 
soon pushed matters to extremities, and when 
the Commune of Paris seized the executive 
power all the vetoed measures were suddenly 
declared law. Church bells were melted for 
cannon, and empty convents were turned into 
factories and workshops. Many priests were 
imprisoned, and several hundred at once ban- 
ished. By the end of August, Tallien, member 
of the Commune, was able to announce to the 
Legislative Assembly that organised massacres 
were about to take place in the prisons. On 
the evening of the first day of the September 
massacres, Fouche asserted from the tribune 
that two hundred priests lay dead at Les 
Carmes. 

The behaviour of the discredited and hunted 
priests was characterised by dignity and courage. 
Some met death praying in the garden of their 
prison ; others took refuge in its chapel, and 
their blood spattered the walls of that conse- 
crated place. When all was over the crowd 
was admitted to the slaughter-house. 

The Papal Internuncio, Salamon, who was 
arrested at the time, wrote an account of those 

153 



Religious Liberty 



September days. Imprisoned in an old granary 
with eighty others, he lamented the dirt and 
stench of the place of his detention more than 
the fact of his incarceration, and prided himself 
on the fact that his neat lay clothes and 
powdered hair contrasted favourably with the 
unwashed and unshaven appearance of the 
priests among whom he was suddenly thrown. 
With sixty-two out of the eighty prisoners 
he was transported from the granary to the 
Abbaye ; the eighteen left behind were under 
orders to rejoin Salamon and his contingent on 
the next day, but the delay in their case proved 
fatal, since all but one of them were assassinated 
in their carriages on the road to the Abbaye. 
The dreary convent hall, in which their fore- 
runners were enclosed, contained neither seat 
nor bed ; their misery was mocked by a jeering 
gaoler who announced to them the massacre 
of the priests at Les Carmes. His auditors, 
realising their immediate peril, began to recite 
the litanies for the dying and the prayers for 
those in the last agony. As the howHng mob 
approached, Salamon, as if winged by terror, 
escaped up the wall through the window into 
a courtyard. There he met a man with hands 
154 



Religious Liberty 



dyed in blood, to whom he protested his inno- 
cence of any crime against the country. Con- 
ducted by this chance acquaintance to the 
court, with shaking knees he watched his recent 
companions all being hacked to death. More 
determined than ever by this spectacle to save 
his own life, he waited during the all-night 
tribunal and, by swearing himself a lawyer and 
clerk of the Parliament and praising the patriots, 
he escaped immediate death, and in the early 
morning was thrown into a small prison. 
Eventually released, he escaped to the Bois de 
Boulogne, where he lived for months in hiding. 
Imprisoned again under the Directoire, he again 
escaped and lived to enjoy many peaceful years. 
" Mon Martyre," as he names the record of 
his experiences, presents a vivid picture of the 
Terror. 

The National Convention succeeded the 
Legislative Assembly in October 1792, and 
together with the newly elected Commune, 
inaugurated a definitely anti-Christian campaign. 
The Convention was too much interested in 
serious reforms to sympathise with the fate of 
priests or King. Absorbed in the problems of 
secular education ; laying the basis of the new 



Religious Liberty 



civil code ; reforming weights and measures ; 
founding museums ; reorganising the army ; 
and reforming the management of hospitals, it 
remained indifferent as to the disposal of the 
remnants of feudality. The death of the King 
took place without creating any disturbance ; 
the people seemed as indifferent to his fate as 
the Government. 

According to Monsignor Meric, a good many 
of the young priests of Saint-Sulpice remained 
in Paris, to be of what service they could to 
the faithful. M. Emery, their superior, was 
incarcerated in that ** vestibule of death," the 
Conciergerie, but he was able to remain in 
communication with his spiritual sons who 
worked as turners, gardeners or labourers, and 
managed to inform them from his prison which 
tumbrils contained penitents and how they were 
to be recognised. Then, at a place agreed, 
sometimes in front of a house, sometimes at 
the scaffold, the condemned person recollected 
himself, made an act of contrition, and received 
from the priest hidden in the crowd a last 
absolution. In the intervals of his ghostly 
labours M. Emery sat quietly in the public 
gaol, his ears stopped with wax, reading Thomas 

156 



Religious Liberty 



of Aquin's "Summa.** He was quite composed, 
though he believed his to be the common fate 
of waiting for the hasty summons before the 
tribunal, the hurried interrogation, the slow 
drive over the cobbled streets, the vision of a 
crowd of many faces, and the quick, merciful 
blade. But Robespierre knew this priest's value 
too well to let him die ; he said that since 
M. Emery had so much power in reconciling 
his flock to death, it were better to keep him in 
gaol, that lamentation and hysteria might cease. 
The Duchess de Noailles-Mouchy wrote to 
her daughters saying Emery was their good 
angel ; and Marie Antoinette was comforted 
during the last days of her long imprisonment 
by thinking that he was silently praying for her 
in a cell adjacent to her own. On the morning 
fixed for her execution she was visited by a 
constitutional priest, whose ministrations she 
declined, but who was ordered to accompany 
her to the scaffold. Coincidentally with her 
death, the dust of elder generations of French 
kings was scattered to the winds, for the tombs 
of St. Denys were rifled by the people, who 
thus proclaimed that the divinity which hedges 
Kings was dead in France. 

157 



Religious Liberty 



The year 1793, which both the Queen and 
M. Emery spent in gaol, was marked by growing 
hostility to priests. Revolutionary tribunals 
with powers of life and death were nominated 
in Paris and the provinces. On March 18, 
1793, the Convention decreed death in twenty- 
four hours to all priests already condemned to 
deportation, and for all non-jurors returning 
to or remaining in France. As a consequence, 
priests were driven on to boats at seaport towns 
and there left, except for the ministrations of 
the charitable, to die of starvation. Scores 
perished in the Noyades of Nantes. The nuns 
of Compiegne went, like the Girondins, singing 
to the scaffold. Many priests were chained to 
the galleys, and were not allowed to kneel or 
pray; some were scourged until they became 
imbeciles ; others were neglected until gangrene 
and scurvy devoured them. 

A famous scene took place in the Assembly 
when Gobel, his vicars, and several cures de- 
clared that they wished to shake off the character 
that had been conferred on them by superstition. 
Mad applause greeted Gobel's surrender of cross 
and ring, and adoption of the red cap of liberty. 
After the retractations came a display of patriotic 

158 



Religious Liberty 



offerings. Both into the Convention and the 
Commune a stream of sacred vessels, sacerdotal 
ornaments and embroidered vestments flowed. 
The vestments of " unutterable Dubois" ca- 
parisoned an ass, and his mitre was bound upon 
its ears. The " spoils of superstition " were 
handed over to a specially appointed committee 
to deal with, and all the actors in this scene 
drank from a chalice the wine of brotherly- 
love. 

As time went on a kind of ruthlessness laid 
hold of good Republicans. From talking of 
Lycurgus, and dreaming of the stern days of 
old, they became in character and action in- 
flexible and without pity. Women went proudly 
and unshriven to the scaffold. Men emulated 
Scasvola and Cato. Adam Lux called Charlotte 
Corday greater than Brutus, and Madame 
Roland sustained herself in *' that pasture of 
great souls," the " Lives " of Plutarch. Abbe 
Barthelemy's " Voyage d'Anacharsis " lay on 
every table, and many men changed their 
Christian appellations for the classic nomencla- 
ture of Greece and Rome. Austerity in dress 
and furniture became the outer sign of the new 
ideals. Hair was left unpowdered, satin coats 

159 



Religious Liberty 



were replaced by fustian wear. Elaborate 
baroque furniture disappeared from houses to 
permit the classic couch and hanging lamp to 
appear. The intellectuals were naturally out of 
sympathy with Catholicism, since their gaze 
was fixed on Rome, not Calvary. Mysticism 
was ruled out of life, which henceforth was to 
run on clear, definite, virtuous lines. The 
Convention became more and more audaciously 
philosophic, and, dominated by the Hebertists, 
it abolished the Christian era and opened the 
door to classic experiments. Anacharsis Clootz 
developed his theories on the divinity of the 
human race at the bar of the tribune, and 
the hierophant, Quintus Aucler, proved to 
his own satisfaction that the worship of 
Jesus was a degenerate form of paganism. 
Romme's proposal of naming the months 
of the new calendar after ideas, such as 
Justice and Equality, was seriously considered, 
but later seasonal names, suggested by Fabre 
d'Eglantine, were adopted. On August lo, at 
a national feast in Paris, the statue of Nature 
was honoured by Hbations. All over the pro- 
vinces secular cults were honoured, and the 
communes consecrated temples to Reason in 

1 60 



Religious Liberty 



every considerable town. On the motion of 
David, Marat's remains were transported to the 
Pantheon, and men invoked " the sacred heart 
of Marat/' At Nevers, Fouche said that he 
had been charged by the Convention '' to 
substitute for superstitious and hypocritical 
cults, to which people still unhappily cHng, that 
of the Republic and national morality." He 
began to laicise the cemeteries by substituting 
a statue of Sleep for the cross, and by writing 
up over the gates " Death is an eternal sleep " 
— the phrase used in the lodges by the illuminists 
to describe that state to which we all must pass. 
Fouche also arranged that a commissary in a 
red cap should accompany the funerals of good 
Republicans, bearing an urn with this inscrip- 
tion : *' L'homme juste ne meurt jamais. II 
vit dans la memoire de ses concitoyens." 

The Commune, to use the language of the 
day, had reached " le sommet de son capitole " ; 
but, in spite of its activity, priests still continued 
to administer the sacraments furtively and 
secretly to reserve the Host. 

After the fall of the Girondins, H6bertists, 
and Dantonists, Couthon, who played Baptist 
to Robespierre's Messiah, announced yet another 

x6i L 



Religious Liberty 



civil religion — that of the Supreme Being. Its 
scheme purported to embody the Deism of the 
" Contrat Social," and though for a time it 
superseded the cult of Reason, it speedily proved 
the destruction of its inventor, and the man 
whom Heine called the bloody hand of Rousseau 
v^ent to the scaffold in the same blue Werther 
costume in which he had played pontiff at the 
inaugural festival of his new religion six weeks 
before. At his death came the epoch of real 
separation between Church and State. 

Cambon, who had previously * proposed that 
each sect should defray its own expenses, 
moved,t as president of the Finance Committee, 
" that the Republic should pay neither salaries 
nor the outgoings of any sect.'* Thus, owing 
to financial exigencies, and, as it were, to 
accident, the separation of Church and State 
was accomplished after five years' agitation. 
Though the Budget of Public Worship was 
abolished, liberty of creeds was not proclaimed, 
and consequently persecution lingered on, like 
an evil habit, which could not be at once broken 
with. 

The world had already seen the fall of 
* November 13, 1792. f September 18, 1794. 

162 



1 



Religious Liberty 



monarchies and the impeachment of kings, but 
it had never heard the decree : " La nation ne 
salarie aucun culte " — a decree which De 
Maistre quoted as evidence of the Satanic 
character of the Revolution, and which, em- 
bodied in the Constitution of the year III., 
seemed sufficient to deliver the Directorate 
from all religious difficulties. An epoch of 
comparative tranquillity was heralded by the 
clause of separation, and though old laws against 
refractories and emigrants were not annulled, 
they for the time being remained in abeyance. 
Interests less domestic claimed the attention of 
the legislators, and it is said that up till the 
Fructidorian " coup d'etat *' * only twenty 
priests suffered death under the Directorate, f 
At Easter, 1 796, the churches were crowded ; 
priests had returned in considerable numbers, 
piety declared itself with boldness, and the Pope 
recommended the faithful to submit to the 
civil power if there were no longer any question 
of the Civil Constitution. By midsummer it 
was calculated that 38,000 parishes had resumed 
their old religion. 

Fresh complications arose with the new 

* September 5, 1797. t July 15? 1796. 

163 



Religious Liberty 



elections to the Directorate and Legislative Body 
in the spring of 1797. Two hundred and sixteen 
members retired, most of whom oiFered them- 
selves for re-election ; but only eleven of their 
number were returned, which upset the balance 
of power, and gave the Constitutionalists a 
majority in the Assembly of the Ancients and 
of the Five Hundred. The Directors, who 
were Conventionalists, found themselves face to 
face with a hostile and, as they feared, a royalist 
legislative ; so they planned a *'coup d'etat" to 
bring themselves back into power. Assured 
from Italy of the sympathetic support of 
Bonaparte, they, with the assistance of troops 
under General Augereau, intimidated both 
Houses into annulHng the recent elections and 
empowering the Directors to nominate men to 
the vacancies so created. The assumption of 
dictatorship by such men as Larevelliere- 
Lepeaux, Rewbell, and Barras, was the prelude 
to unlimited persecution. In order to destroy 
what they considered the hideous dangers to 
the State of royalism and clericalism, they 
resorted to the summary methods of the Terror ; 
and the treatment of the displaced deputies 
foreshadowed the kind of justice that was to be 

164 



Religious Liberty 



meted out to priests — that of the '^ guillotine 
s^che.'' Fifty-three deputies were condemned 
to transportation for being associated in royalist 
conspiracies. The majority escaped, but six 
members of the Ancients, five of the Five 
Hundred, and six other men were taken from 
the Temple and driven for thirteen days across 
France in four iron cages to Rochefort, exposed 
like wild beasts to the curiosity of the people. 
Thence they were shipped on a seven weeks' 
voyage to Cayenne, and there deposited to 
encamp by the banks of the Conamana, where 
the observance of Quintidi and Decadi was 
enforced on them. 

Before Sir Edward Pellew and other English 
sea captains had made it unsafe to transport 
priests to over-sea prisons, several horrible 
journeys had been made, of which records are 
left. On one journey seven priests died of 
suffocation, and when after a fifty-four days' 
voyage port was sighted, the ships were left 
anchored off the shore for days in the tropic 
sun while the crew went holiday-making on 
shore. On land they were tortured by insects, 
badly fed, and a prey to fever, and their lives 
by the banks of an unhealthy river were more 

i6s 



Religious Liberty 



terrible than those of their predecessors in the 
Conciergerie. Inspired by the Directors, the 
** Moniteur " made out their place of detention 
as an earthly paradise.* " C'est dans les lieux 
les plus sains et les plus fertiles, que les deportes 
ont ete places. lis habitent pres la riviere 
Conamana." 

The Directorate was most thorough in its 
attempt to suppress Catholic practices ; it made 
the observance of Decadi and Quintidi com- 
pulsory, and in two years authorised over 8000 
arrests for deportation, but a relatively small 
number of these sentences were put into execu- 
tion. It forced men to work on Sundays, and 
tried to prohibit the sale of fish on Fridays. 
Convinced that only that is thoroughly destroyed 
which is replaced, they encouraged Theophilan- 
thropy. The Minister of the Interior distri- 
buted a *' Manuel des Theophilanthropes " in 
the departments, and made State grants to the 
society. The Theophilanthropists were an 
enlightened body, excluding no religion, and 
only meeting to promote morality. Readings 
and homilies on tolerance, truth, filial piety, 
and probity in commerce were held by them, 
* December 14, 1798. 
166 



Religious Liberty 



and in the centre of their temple stood an altar 
on which fruit and flowers were laid according 
to season, while maxims of virtue decorated 
their walls. Their cult had been founded by an 
English Deist, David Williams, in 1 766, and in 
their ranks in France were numbered Bernardin 
de Saint-Pierre, M. J. Chenier, the painter 
David, and other notable people. Up till the 
eighteenth Fructidor they had existed, as it 
were, in theory ; but after that date they existed 
in active practice. Noble in idea and sentiment, 
their worship and ceremonial soon degenerated 
with use into a ribald travesty of itself The 
report of an official shows to what baseness 
secular religion could descend. 

" Au temple de la Paix (2) X"^ arrondisse- 
ment, pendant la celebration des mariages, il y 
regnait un bruit confus qui rendait inutile 
toute lecture ou discours adresses au peuple. 
L'orchestre surtout contribuait au desordre par 
un choix d'aires propres a faire rire. Un noir 
se maria avec une blanche. On executa I'air 
d'Azemia, 

L'ivoire avec I'eb^ne 
Fait de jolis bijoux. 
# # # « 

167 



Religious Liberty 



Aussitot le temple retentit des cris de ' Bis * et de 
'Bravo' comme une salle de comedie. Une vieille 
femme epousa un homme plus jeune qu'elle ; la 
musique joua cet air du * Prisonnier.' 

Vieille femme, jeune mari, 
Feront toujours mauvais menage. 

Les bruyantes acclamations redoublerent, ainsi 
que la confusion des nouveaux epoux." * 

" Fetes Decadaires " were instituted, and the 
Commune of Paris arranged that churches 
already restored to Catholicism should be at the 
disposal of the State for the whole morning on the 
Decadi, and that on these occasions all emblems 
of the Christian faith were to be veiled. It was 
decided that fifteen churches should be rebap- 
tized as " temples decadaires." Saint-Roch, for 
example, became the Temple du Genie, because 
it held the tomb of Corneille ; Saint-Eustache, 
because it was near Les Halles, was the Temple 
de TAgriculture ; Saint-Sulpice, which became 
the Temple de la Victoire, was, owing to its 
dedication, the scene of the famous banquet on 
the evening of Brumaire. 

* "Haumont au Ministre de I'int^rieur," ii Ther. 
an VIII. F.I.C., Series 25. 

168 



Religious Liberty 



With Brumaire came a great uplifting of 
hearts, for Bonaparte, the child of the Revolu- 
tion, was believed to be the champion of true 
liberty. All laws of deportation were repealed, 
and it was permitted to open churches on other 
feasts than the Decadi. Though the Repub- 
lican Kalendar was still the legal kalendar, the 
Gregorian came once more into use, and the 
observance of Decadi became gradually restricted 
to the official world. Numbers of shops dared 
to close on Sundays. Some closed both on 
Decadi and Sunday to please all customers. 

Six churches in Paris, including Notre-Dame 
and Saint-Sulpice, were served by Constitutionals, 
and the rest by non-conformists. The scene of 
the massacres, PEglise des Carmes, was much 
frequented, and so was Saint-Roch, where 
Madame Recamier collected the alms. Clergy 
slowly resumed their distinguishing habit, and 
superiors like M. Emery began to re-assemble 
their seminarists. It was calculated that there 
were about 15,000,000 professing Catholics in 
France, 17,000,000 Free-thinkers, and 3,000,000 
Protestants, Jews and Theophilanthropists, all of 
whom were at last free to believe what they 
pleased. Everything seemed to be tending 

169 



Religious Liberty 



towards a full realisation of liberty of worship 
and liberty of conscience, and what Robespierre 
had called ** the alliance between sceptre and 
censer " seemed for ever done away. For two 
years men thought that the day of freedom had 
in truth dawned. Catholicism, since it was 
separated from the State, would grow and rule 
by spiritual, not political power. Protestantism 
was allowed to flourish and spread its spirit of 
self-reliance and inquiry. Jews were recognised 
as citizens, and black men as voters. Men 
seemed to be entering at length the promised 
land of liberty and love. 

The Concordat dispelled such illusions. The 
Catholic Church, in spite of its despoilment, had 
still a great advantage over other religions, for 
when all other forms of society were in process 
of solution it remained rigid and unchanged in 
composition, and though its elements were 
scattered over the face of the earth they were 
ready to fly back like steel filings to the magnet 
at the commanding word. Napoleon determined 
to make her advantage his own ; but though he 
wished her to retain her venerable character in 
the eyes of the world, he intended himself to be 
the master mind which directed her policy. The 

170 



Religious Liberty 



world knows how in this matter he, in over- 
estimating the power which the Organic Articles 
would confer upon the State, made what he 
afterwards was heard to call the mistake of his 
administration. Anxious to take no false step 
in the great negotiation, he proceeded as a 
preliminary measure to acquaint himself with 
the history of the relationship of the Gallican 
Church to Rome. He caused the works of 
Bossuet, that great upholder of French liberties, 
to be translated from the Latin, and had himself 
carefully instructed in their purport and tendency. 
Then, after much deliberation, the new Pact was 
drawn up. Many difficulties had to be over- 
come, since the old Civil Constitution of 1790, 
with the democratic element eliminated, was to 
be the basis of the new Concordat. The Pope 
was to be coerced into acknowledging the 
validity of the Constitutional orders; he was 
to promise sanction to future nominations to 
bishoprics, and to a redistribution of dioceses and 
parishes ; he was to confirm the Catholic Church 
in France, not as the only State religion, but as 
one of the several subsidised creeds; and he 
was to sanction the Church disendowment of 
1 79 1. It required all Napoleon's ingenuity and 

171 



Religious Liberty 



firmness to push the matter through. Again 
and again it appeared as if negotiations would 
be broken off, but after endless discussion and 
wranghng Consalvi and Joseph Bonaparte 
signed the Concordat on July 15, 1801. In 
conformity with his centralised system of 
government, Napoleon arranged that all bishops 
were to be nominated by the First Consul 
and not elected as had been the scheme in 
the Civil Constitution ; and that all were 
personally to swear allegiance to the State in 
the person of the First Consul. It had been 
arranged that on the redistribution of dioceses 
all bishops should resign their sees, and 
Napoleon insisted on nominating at least ten 
members of the new episcopate from among 
Constitutional priests. In spite of the signature 
of the Concordat, one difficulty remained to be 
overcome — that of persuading the Pope and his 
advisers to acknowledge Constitutional orders. 
It was not till near Easter, 1802, when 
Napoleon's patience was almost exhausted, 
that a " via media " was discovered which saved 
the honour of both parties. The Constitutionals 
refused to retract in public, and the Pope could 
not make terms with them unless they did retract. 
172 



Religious Liberty 



It was arranged, therefore, that if they would 
abjure their errors privately before two witnesses 
they would be regarded as within the true fold 
once again. Bernier undertook to see to this 
matter, and though he only had one day in 
which to accomplish the work he certified that 
all the Constitutionals had retracted. D'Haus- 
sonville denies the alleged retractation, and 
avers that the certificate was drawn up so that 
the peace might be concluded, and that it was 
a mere form in which no party, not even the 
Roman Legate, was deceived. All Catholics did 
not admire Papal tactics, and a rhyme was 
bandied about in Italy and France that revealed 
popular opinion : 

Pio [VI.], per conservar la fede, 

Perde la sede. 
Pio [VII.], per conservar la sede, 

Perde la fede. 

The Concordat left the civil power master of 
the functionary clergy, for they were salaried 
and bound to conform to any edicts that might 
at any time be deemed necessary for the greater 
tranquillity of the State. The famous "Organic 
Articles " determined that the Holy Father 
should not send an address to the faithful 

173 



Religious Liberty 



without its being countersigned by Govern- 
ment ; that no council or diocesan synod could 
be held without Government sanction; that 
bishops should not be allowed to leave their 
dioceses without the consent of the First 
Consul ; that seminarists should be taught the 
declaration of 1682; and that the secular clergy 
should be kept in good order. 

The attitude of the Church to Bonaparte 
can only be called abject. He was honoured 
in the most fulsome way by the clergy, and 
received such homage in entering a church 
that he felt as if he were in his own palace. 
His famous Catechism was approved at Rome 
and ordered to be used in all dioceses. The 
Papal Legate, in his circular to the clergy, in- 
stituted a "f^te de Napoleon" for August 15, 
for had the great ruler not imitated Cyrus and 
Darius in restoring the house of God ? The 
priests at one church porch received him, sing- 
ing "Ecce mitto angelum meum, qui pras 
parabit viam meam." A review of the second 
edition of Chateaubriand's " Genie du Chris- 
tianisme," which was dedicated to the restorer 
of the Church, appeared by consular command 
on Easter morning. 

174 



Religious Liberty 



As the " Te Deum '* that closed the Revo- 
lution reverberated through the aisles of Notre- 
Dame, thoughts of the many valiant men who, 
since the singing of the *' Veni Creator " at 
Versailles, had died to destroy what Napoleon 
seemed about to rebuild, surged through the 
minds of the onlookers. 

Gregoire summed up the situation in a few 
contemptuous words : 

" Tous les motifs de soumission, toutes les 
preuves que vous alleguez en faveur du Con- 
cordat sont precisement celles dont nous nous 
servimes pour etablir qu'il fallait accepter 
la Constitution civile. . . . Vous avez mis 
I'Europe en feu, attise la guerre exterieure et 
interieure, cause des massacres, des persecutions, 
pour faire dix ans plus tard ce que nous fimes 
dix ans plus tot." * 

Thirteen years had passed, and it seemed to 
contemporaries as though religious legislation 
had revolved in a vicious circle, only to end 
where it began. Men marvelled that all the per- 
secution, pillage, and debate of those unutterable 

* Champion, " La Separation de I'Eglise et de TEtat en 
1792," p. 166. 



Religious Liberty 



years had effected so small a change in ideas 
and so unnoticeable an effect in national habits. 
Now, through the telescope of a century, it 
is possible to see that the experimental enact- 
ments of those days did embody the earnest of 
progress and reformation. Though the early 
revolutionaries suffered blame from the philo- 
sophers for their timidity, and from the clerics 
for their boldness, no one praises them for the 
moderation with which they approached ques- 
tions of religious reform. The abolition of 
tithes was a measure forced on them by the 
people ; out of the debate on this measure grew 
the scheme for disendowment ; and since the 
property of the Church was to be administered 
by the State, out of disendowment grew the Civil 
Constitution of the Clergy and the subsidiary 
question of the suppression of the religious 
orders. Disendowment, in the first instance, 
was not intended to be the " criminal spolia- 
tion '' which clerical writers have called it ; 
rather was it the only avenue of administrative 
reform open to the Assembly. Though it was 
a step precipitated and, unfortunately, palliated 
by financial exigencies, it was not caused by 
them, and if the Civil Constitution had proved 
176 



Religious Liberty 



a working success and all the charities and pro- 
posed pensions had been administered by the 
Government, the profits of the State would have 
been small, which seems to prove that the pro- 
moters of the scheme were not entirely actuated, 
as has been too often suggested, by motives of 
impiety and greed. When the clergy and the 
faithful had been consolidated by the application 
of the Civil Constitution into an obdurate oppo- 
sition, persecution, spoliation, and crime of all 
kinds embittered the estrangement of Catholics 
and revolutionaries, and brought about, after 
five years of internecine strife, the abolition of 
the Budget of Public Worship. From the 
moment that the nation decided to subsidise 
no creed, Catholicism was theoretically free to 
disseminate itself once more throughout the 
land, and, except for the terrible Fructidorian 
persecution of 1797, was able slowly and 
quietly to resume its sway over the towns and 
villages of France. Churches were cleared of 
rubble ; altars were reconsecrated ; the hanging 
lamp was rekindled in ten thousand chancels, 
and the Holy Sacrifice was offered openly and 
without fear. Though aspiration had lured 
France toward the future, custom had enchained 

177 M 



Religious Liberty 



her to the past, and the time of her complete 
emancipation was distantly postponed by Napo- 
leon's pact with the Pope. The Liberals who 
attended the Feast of the Concordat feared that 
they were assisting at the rehabilitation of the 
evils of intolerance and tyranny. To their 
descendants, who have lived to see that the 
empire of the Church over France was by the 
Revolution mortally enfeebled, it must remain 
an open question whether the great gains ot 
religious liberty and tolerance have ever yet 
been won. 



178 



MADAME DE STAEL 
AND NAPOLEON: 
A STUDY IN IDEALS 



MADAME DE STAEL 
AND NAPOLEON: 
A STUDY IN IDEALS 

HOWEVER well acquainted men may 
be with the facts of history, they 
are not often intimate with its emo- 
tions. The interest in occurrences is not 
paralleled in strength or popularity by a cor- 
responding interest in enthusiasms, and though 
some try in dealing with history to ftcl, as 
well as to think and see, that sympathy is 
always rare which can be fired by ideals long 
discarded and by faiths long dead. The French 
Revolution is for many minds but a catalogue 
of unsuccessful experiments in reform, and in 
the present day of disillusion it is difficult to 
realise with any adequate intensity the grandeur 
and sanctity of the ideals that lay behind that 
strange series of events. Now that eyes no 
longer see a resplendent vision in the future of 
democracy ; now that minds no longer expect 
the millennium in the enfranchisement of man, 
it is hard even to imagine the attitude of those 

i8i 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

revolutionary leaders who thought by their 
doctrines to bring about the kingdom of 
heaven upon earth. In France in the year 
1789 men seemed, as it were, intoxicated with 
the thought of their own perfectibility. It 
was as though an ecstasy had come upon the 
soul of the French nation, as though a voice 
had spoken from the clouds, bidding men to rise 
and make the great ascent towards perfection. 

The Great Revolution began in no selfish 
scramble for possessions, for its pioneers had 
their gaze riveted on nobler and less corruptible 
gains. The movement was in its inception 
spiritual ; men were at first desirous, not of 
material rights, but of ideal rights ; and it must 
be remembered that the axe was not, at the 
beginning, laid to the root of the ancient tree 
of Feudalism, under whose dim shadows the 
people had existed for so long. The nation 
that had sat in darkness had seen a great light, 
and though centuries of despotic years had 
made men unfit for democracy, yet they were 
eager with the eagerness of inspiration to rise 
and live according to the words that rang so 
grandly in the air, Freedom, Equality, Frater- 
nity 1 Born of fear and disappointment was the 

182 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

later rage for destruction and blood, for the 
love-feasts of the federated bear witness to the 
spirit in which before the day of disillusion 
the great ascension was attempted. The first 
revolutionaries acted on the hypothesis that 
man was born good ; that it was only necessary 
to break down the conventional social barriers 
to let goodness everywhere prevail. The glad 
festivals and joyous dances of the ** federes," in 
which Wordsworth took part as he journeyed 
down the Rhone, seemed almost to justify such 
an assumption. But when the moment of 
ecstasy was past, and the idealists found that 
their principles were not accepted by every 
one ; that their hopes were by many considered 
vain, they, like the Inquisitors of Spain, did 
not lose faith in their own tenets, but assumed 
those who did not agree with them to be in 
mortal sin and worthy of death. Their hearts 
hardened, and they began to violate the liberty 
they preached. The oppression and cruelty 
characterising the second phase of Revolution, 
which destroyed the Monarchy, but did not 
establish the Republic, remain a dire and dis- 
couraging monument to the betrayal of ideals 
in precipitate action. 

183 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

After ten years of empirical government a 
sudden end was put to all the theories and 
visions in which the Revolution had had its 
origin, no less than to the inefficient adminis- 
tration of the Directorate, by the man of 
marble — Bonaparte. Already, while command- 
ing in Italy, the Corsican general had shown 
the home government that he was possessed of 
an independent and arbitrary temper, for he 
pursued his own policy, and would submit to 
no dictation from his official superiors. During 
the first Italian campaign he became acutely 
conscious of his own great personality ; he said 
of himself that every day he seemed to see 
before him new possibilities and new horizons. 
His imperious character made itself even more 
apparent in Egypt. There, in his contact with 
the East, he lost all remnants of his earlier 
beliefs in the goodness of men. " Savage man 
is but a dog " was the grim axiom in which he 
summed up his experience. On his return to 
France from the Nile, he requested the Ancients 
to promise that his next command should be 
that of Paris. To all outward appearance he 
held himself aloof from political affairs; indeed, 
up till the coup d'etat of the 1 8th Brumaire, 

184 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

he kept silence in such matters, and seemed 
more interested in the mystery and worship of 
the Egyptian temples he had so lately left 
than in the anarchy in which his country was 
engulfed. 

The state of France was at the time appalling 
to contemplate : the nearly impassable roads 
were infested with robbers, and the crumbling 
walls of the prisons offered no security against 
crime ; the hospitals were hotbeds of disease, 
and, owing to lack of funds, many sick of 
various contagious diseases were turned loose 
on to the streets ; agriculture was disorganised ; 
elementary education hardly existed ; the na- 
tional credit was low. The condition of the 
capital may be summed up in the one word- 
chaos. Not a house was in repair, many in fact 
were in ruins ; leaden roofs as well as panels 
and doors of wood had been removed and sold 
by the new acquirers of national property ; the 
streets were dirty — not a few of them were no 
better than open sewers ; it was not uncommon 
in the dawn to find dead bodies in the roadway ; 
crimes of violence were made easy, for street- 
lighting was as much neglected as every other 
detail of municipal administration. The people 

i8s 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

passionately pursued amusement, and took but 
faint interest in political life. Insanity, owing 
to the unstable condition of affairs, had greatly 
increased, while the population of Paris had, 
in ten years, dwindled by about one hundred 
thousand souls. 

On every side men were confronted by an 
intricate tangle of unadministered affairs. The 
orderly warp and woof of old French life was 
gone. Amidst the confusion of bankruptcy, 
agiotage, paganism and crime, it required a 
genius to discern the strands of vigorous and 
enduring quality, capable of being woven into 
a new texture of state. No one guessed that 
the short dark soldier moving silently and 
unobserved among the fortifications and bar- 
racks and museums of Paris was the only man 
who saw the situation as it really was, or who 
was capable of seizing the opportunity of 
reducing chaos to order. 

The difference between the Faith of 1789, in 
which the Revolution had its origin, and the 
Common Sense of 1800, in which the Revolu- 
tion had its end, is as wide as the space between 
stars and earth. The measure of that difference 
may be expressed in two terms, Madame de 

186 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Stael and the First Consul. The war of words 
and deeds carried on by these protagonists from 
the Consulate to the capitulation of Paris is a 
study of captivating interest. It was far more than 
an enmity between two individuals : it was the 
conflict of two epochs of the Revolution — 1789 
and 1800. Each champion transcended the 
limits of personality in so far as they represented 
converse sequences of ideas and opposed philo- 
sophies of life. Madame de Stael stood for 
Rousseauism, for faith in the innate goodness 
and perfectibility of man, for belief in liberty 
as the first condition of progress for humanity. 
Bonaparte contemptuously nicknamed her, and 
those who agreed with her, '' Ideologues," but 
with ready wit she called him '' Ideophobe," 
and so had the best of the encounter. The 
First Consul, though he exploited the doctrine 
of individual rights to the last degree, was in 
himself the reaction against Rousseau's idealism, 
for he looked upon the human race as a subject 
for the " experiments of genius " — as raw 
material for the manufacture of empires. 

Madame de Stael kept a record of her 
struggle with Bonaparte ; a few years ago, 
after the lapse of nearly a century, the 

187 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

authentic text of her manuscript, " Dix Annees 
d'Exil," was given to an indifferent world. 
But that book, which of old had been pictured 
as the torch of an incendiary, produced no 
conflagration. The transient interest of curi- 
osity evoked by it in no way reflected the 
white heat of the furnace at which it had been 
kindled. Throughout the nineteenth century 
the book had been withheld from the public, 
except in mutilated form. Diplomatically 
deleted by Baron de Stael, it was first published 
two months after Napoleon's death, and re- 
prints of this emasculated edition appeared 
at intervals during the fifty years following. 
Although, to readers of imaginative sympathy, 
it is still a living book, it is a failure in so far 
as it missed its mark, and the chagrin of its 
author may be guessed at when it is observed 
how great were the precautions taken by her to 
prevent its destruction. Three copies of the 
manuscript exist at Chateau Coppet: one in 
Madame de Stael's straggling and unpunctuated 
writing ; another in the writing of Miss Ran- 
dall, English governess to Albertine de Stael ; 
and a third, in Madame de Stael's hand, which, 
for fear the police should seize the other two, 

i88 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

was entitled " Extrait de Memoires inedits du 
temps de la Reine Elisabeth en Angleterre. 
Tire d'un manuscrit de la Biblioth^ue d'Edin- 
burgh." In this last copy, Napoleon some- 
times figures as Charles II. and sometimes as 
Elizabeth ; the Due d'Enghien is Mary Stuart ; 
Savary is Lord Kent ; Schlegel is M. William ; 
Necker is " my wife." The book was begun 
in 1800, and broken off at M. Necker 's death 
in 1804. It was resumed in 1810 under great 
provocation (the destruction of *'De I'Alle- 
magne"), and stopped altogether on the 
writer's arrival in Sweden in 181 2. No one 
knew when the book would see the light ; it 
was merely written " to remind the men of a 
future age how it was possible to suffer under 
the yoke of oppression." The book represents 
a lively experience, and is not altogether, as 
some critics have suggested, the product of 
imaginative hate. Rather does it appear to be 
the eloquent cry of a suppressed party, great in 
the nobility of its ideas and sincere in its love 
of liberty. '*The Apologists for Bonapartism 
have been so numerous that it is well for us 
to realise how, under that magnificent visible 
world there lay an invisible underworld of 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

moral poverty and debasement of character, 
which were the direct results of despotism." 

It has been the fashion to impute mean 
motives to Madame de Stael in her feud against 
Bonaparte. Such an imputation seems barely 
justifiable. No doubt, as a woman, she was 
piqued by his rudeness and contempt, but that 
was far from being the cause of her opposition. 
She was ever ready to sink personal considera- 
tions in her enthusiasm for morality and 
justice, and it is not easy to prove that she 
was an unworthy champion of the causes she 
espoused. Bitterly as she opposed his system 
of administration under the Consulate and 
Empire, she never seems to have hated Bona- 
parte as a man. Indeed, it is doubtful whether 
the early admiration which his colossal vitality 
and ability compelled in her was ever completely 
extinguished. 

The opening words of " Dix Annees d'Exil " 
are not without nobility, and serve to explain 
her attitude of mind. 

" Ce n'est point pour occuper le public de 
moi que j'ai resolu de raconter les circonstances 
de dix annees d'exil ; les malheurs que j'ai 
190 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

eprouves, avec quelque amertume que je les aie 
sentis, sont si peu de chose au milieu des 
desastres publics dont nous sommes temoins, 
qu'on aurait honte de parler de soi, si les 
evenetnents qui nous concernent n'etaient pas 
lies a la grande cause de I'humanite menacee. 
L'Empereur Napoleon, dont le caractere se 
montre tout entier dans chaque trait de sa vie, 
m'a persecutee avec un soin minutieux, avec 
une activite toujours croissante, avec une 
rudesse inflexible ; et mes rapports avec lui 
ont servi a me le faire connaitre, longtemps 
avant que I'Europe eut appris le mot de cette 
enigme, et lorsqu'elle se laissait devorer par le 
sphinx, faute d'avoir su le deviner." 

Divergent as were the mature views ot 
Madame de Stael and Napoleon, in early life 
their enthusiasms had been the same. Both 
had come under the influence, it might almost 
be called the domination, of Rousseau's 
ideas, ideas which, towards the end of the 
eighteenth century, laid hold, like some 
daemonic force, of old and young, peasant and 
aristocrat alike. Bonaparte, like many of his 
contemporaries in Italy, Germany, and France, 

191 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

began life as a sentimentalist and dreamer who 
thought much of the sufferings of men and 
dwelt deeply on the problem of how to make 
happiness, which followers of Rousseau thought 
the goal of life, attainable for all. Like 
Werther, he admired the nebulous Ossian, and 
by the banks of the Nile read Madame de 
Stael's treatise " De I'Influence des Passions " 
with interest. Garat called him " a philosopher 
leading armies." No one in the early days 
guessed how soon the philosophic mantle was 
to be exchanged for the mail coat of tyranny. 

Both Bonaparte and Madame de Stael at 
different times visited the grave of that un- 
worthy sage who had inspired thousands, and 
on whose doctrines had been founded the new 
code of human liberty. In comparing the 
accounts of these two pilgrimages we imprint 
an indelible picture on our memories. Stanislas 
de Girardin relates that Bonaparte, on his visit 
to the tomb of Rousseau, said, " ' It would 
have been better for the repose of France that 
this man had never been born.' ' Why, First 
Consul ? ' said I. ' He prepared the French 
Revolution. I thought it was not for you 
to complain of the Revolution.' * Well,' he 

192 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

replied, 'the future will show whether it 
would not have been better for the repose of 
the world that neither I nor Rousseau had 
existed.' " In a conversation with Roederer, 
he once said : " The more I read Voltaire, 
the more I like him ; he is always reasonable, 
never a charlatan, never a fanatic : he is made 
for mature minds. ... I have been especially 
disgusted with Rousseau since I have seen the 
East." 

Madame de Stael's early enthusiasm suffered 
no similar change. To her Rousseau remained 
an inspiration. She describes a visit made in 
girlhood to the shrine at Ermenonville : 

" His funeral urn is placed in an island ; it 
is not unintentionally approached, and the 
religious sentiment which induces the traveller 
to cross the lake by which it is surrounded 
proves him to be worthy of carrying thither his 
offering. I strewed no flowers upon his 
melancholy tomb, but I contemplated it for a 
long time, my eyes suffused with tears : I 
quitted it in silence, and remained in the most 
profound meditation." 

The Revolutionaries of the National Con- 

193 N 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

vention regarded Rousseau as their saviour, 
and an oration made by Lakanal in that 
assembly begging the citizens to take the ashes 
of the great liberator out of their lonely grave, 
and inter them in the Pantheon embodies the 
general sentiment of that day. " Honour in 
him the beneficent genius of humanity ; honour 
the friend, the defender, the apostle of liberty ; 
the promoter of the rights of man, the eloquent 
forerunner of this Revolution which you are 
asked to consummate for the happiness of the 
nations." Men's hearts vibrated in response 
to this appeal : the reformer's remains were 
carried with circumstance and veneration to 
the Pantheon : and his miserable Therese was 
granted an annuity out of the public funds. 
Not only was Rousseau their present saviour, 
he was also to be their future religion. It was 
not proposed that the Pantheon should for 
long contain the sacred relics. For some while 
it had been intended that a vast plantation of 
trees should be made round the Temple of 
Great Men, '' whose silent shade would enhance 
the religious sentiment of the place." In this 
august wood a grove of poplars was to surround 
the monument to the author of '' Emile," in 

194 



Madame de Stael a7td Napoleon 

remembrance of the earlier burial-place in the 
lake of Ermenonville, " for that melancholy 
tree," since it had stood sentinel at his dis- 
solution, " had become inseparable from the 
idea of his tomb." 

In 1799 Madame de Stael was but one out 
of the many lovers of progress who believed 
in Bonaparte as the hope of down-trodden 
humanity. In him she saw the man who was 
to put the seal to the magnificent promise of 
the early Revolution. How could she guess 
that the campaign in Egypt, which had so fired 
her imagination, had cured him of any lingering 
belief in Rousseau's theories ? Like the 
majority of people in Paris, she was ignorant 
of the opinions Bonaparte at this time held on 
men and politics. He was known only as a 
military genius, not as a civil administrator, 
and it was vaguely and popularly supposed that 
he, the child of the Revolution, would take his 
stand on its three great principles. All the 
hopes of all the friends of progress were, on 
this hypothesis, concentrated in him. He 
was to the Liberals of Europe at that moment 
as the day-star of hope. Against the horizon 
of the dawning century, he stood illumined as 
19s 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

a herald of better days and diviner deeds. At 
his feet, the patriot, the lover of progress, the 
searcher after truth, the poet, the philosopher, 
were ready to kneel, as they would not have 
knelt to any saint. His was the figure to 
whom the prayers of thousands went up as to 
a great deliverer : from Prussia, still iron- 
bound by the legacy of Frederick the Great ; 
from the principalities of the Holy Roman 
Empire ; from Italy, toiling under the Austrian 
yoke ; from Greece, the fief of Turkey ; from 
all who groaned under the old evils of military, 
feudal, or ecclesiastical despotism. He was the 
hero who was to fulfil the heroic ideals of the 
Revolution, who was to become the missioner 
of the new freedom. This was the role for 
which many had cast him ; was the role he never 
accepted. His new-found destiny enshrined 
the disappointment in Europe of countless 
hopes and aspirations. 

None of those who assisted in the coup detat 
of the 1 8th Brumaire knew that they were 
founding an Empire. Bonaparte's speech 
before the Council of the Ancients on the day 
of his election to the Consulate was disarming. 
*' Citizens, the Republic was on the point of 

196 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

perishing ; your decree has saved it. We will 
have the Republic. We will have it founded 
on genuine liberty, on the representative 
system." And later he said once more to the 
Ancients : " People talk of a new Cromwell, of 
a new Caesar. Citizens, had I aimed at such a 
part it would have been easy for me to assume 
it on my return from Italy, in the moment of 
my most glorious triumph, when the army and 
the parties invited me to seize it. I aspired not 
to it then. I aspire not to it now." With 
mild words he began his campaign against 
liberty. He himself proclaimed that his desire 
was "to close the wounds of France." There 
were to be no more scaffolds, and no more 
exiles ; the churches were to be re-opened, and 
peace was to reign in the land. Dominical 
observance once more became the recognised 
national practice, and the dull decadian festivals 
were forgotten in an access of new piety. Every 
one was sick of theories and principles, and 
philosophers were blamed for all that had 
happened. Disillusion was the malady of the 
moment. Ideas were at a discount, and their 
domination considered hardly less galling than 
that of the old feudality. People were tired ot 
197 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

a liberty which in practice meant anarchy, and 
of a brotherhood which had become the symbol 
of bankruptcy. 

In crises, men are apt to choose the one 
dictator rather than the multitude of coun- 
cillors. Calvin was called upon to save 
Geneva; Cromwell to emancipate England. 
In 1799 Bonaparte was the necessary man for 
France. He alone could reconstruct the 
country from the ruins of her past. His 
polity resembled that of the Catholic Church 
in so far as it aimed at introducing the outward 
husk and semblance of democracy, while retain- 
ing the reality of autocracy as the kernel of his 
constitution. \n proportion as his grasp upon the 
administration became more assured, and govern- 
ment became more despotic, the hearts of the 
Liberals grew sick with hope deferred ; their 
aspirations were choked ; their dreams were dis- 
sipated. ''This very world, which is the world 
of all of us," no longer held the revelation ; the 
stars no longer visited the earth. 

The First Consul brought men back to facts. 

For him the right of man meant the might of 

man, and in practice the might of one man. 

Ordinary people he believed to be in no way fit 

198 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

to govern themselves ; the anarchic condition 
of France abundantly demonstrated the futility 
of such a notion. He merely expressed the 
unconscious opinion of many to whom it had 
long become evident that a people is not sud- 
denly lifted up from serfdom to authority ; 
that a nation of slaves is not inspired as if by 
some divine afflatus with the virtues of free and 
responsible citizens. Visions of the immediate 
apotheosis of man, cherished in the Revolution's 
dawn, had gone like a shadow, not even as the 
shadow of reality, but as the shadow of a dream. 
Government for the people by the people was 
seen to involve a laborious educational course 
on which men were hardly at the time prepared 
to enter. Let the Liberals cherish what faith 
in humanity they chose ; Bonaparte was not 
under the pleasing delusion that man was 
ready for self-government. He believed Rous- 
seauism and romanticism to make for bad 
government, and absolutism to be the ideal 
constitution. The sum of the administrative 
system of the Consulate is too familiar to be 
dwelt upon. In theory the liberty of the nation 
was guaranteed by representation based on 
manhood suffrage. In practice the First Consul 
199 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

became a dictator. He was supported by a 
Council of State, the Legislative Assembly, and 
the Tribunate. These bodies formulated, dis- 
cussed, and voted upon the laws. Both the 
Council and the Tribunate sent three members 
to represent their views to the Legislative 
Assembly. Besides these three bodies, there 
was a Senate whose business was to " maintain 
or annul all acts which are reported to it as 
unconstitutional by the Tribunate or the 
Government." The Senate, in the first in- 
stance selected by the Consuls (though later 
co-opting fresh members according to its own 
discretion), selected in its turn from lists 
presented by the electors, the members of the 
Tribunate and of the Legislative Assembly. 
The presidents of the Cantonal Assemblies, 
who really controlled the electorate, were 
chosen by the First Consul from amongst can- 
didates submitted from the cantons. This 
centralised method of administration made it 
comparatively easy for Bonaparte to impress his 
whole will upon the nation, and to subordinate 
the welfare of the individual to the perfecting 
of the State-machine. 

The reign of the First Consul had barely 

200 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

opened when Madame de Stael began to be 
agitated by doubts as to Bonaparte's love of 
liberty. Without waiting for decided acts ot 
tyranny, she set herself in opposition to what 
she believed to be his tendency. He asked why 
she could not attach herself to his government, 
and wondered whether she wanted anything 
from him ; possibly the money her father, M. 
Necker, had lent to the State, or perhaps a 
residence in Paris ? He informed her that she 
might have anything she wished. " It does 
not matter what I ' wish,' but what I think," 
she answered, thus throwing down the challenge 
to the greatest of men. To one who believed 
every man to have his price, it came as some- 
thing of a shock to find that a mere woman was 
ready to fight, not for advantage but for an 
ideal. Madame de Stael's political mouthpiece, 
Benjamin Constant, made what stand he could 
against the introduction of absolutism, and in 
a great speech to the Tribunes reclaimed for 
their body the independence necessary for its 
usefulness. Without such independence, he 
declared, " there would be nothing but slavery 
and silence, silence which the whole of Europe 
would hear." He appeared to hurl defiance at 

201 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

the First Consul, who was greatly incensed. As 
a consequence, the press attacked both Madame 
de Stael and Benjamin Constant with violence. 
She was represented as the agent of an Orleanist 
and clerical conspiracy, and an article in the 
" Peuple " ended in this conciliatory fashion: 
" Ce n'est pas votre faute si vous etes laide ; 
mais c'est votre faute si vous etes intrigante." 

Not only the Jacobin, but also the Royalist 
press was ranged against her. They called her 
Curchodine (her mother's maiden name had been 
Curchod), and twitted her with running after 
glory and people in high positions ; with writing 
on metaphysics, which she did not understand ; 
on morality, which she did not practise ; and on 
the virtues of her sex, which she did not possess. 
Undaunted by this attack and by the cold 
behaviour of those in society, who desired the 
favour of Bonaparte, she wrote a defence of 
theorists and philosophers. Though the First 
Consul was inclined to make liberty answerable 
for all the crimes committed in its name, she at 
least was anxious to prove herself able to dis- 
tinguish the beauty of the pure ideal from its 
caricature in practical life. In " De la Littera- 
ture consideree dans ses rapports avec les Insti- 

202 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

tutions sociales," she made an act of faith, '' of 
inextinguishable faith," in the law of progress, in 
the Rousseau view of life, in the perfectibility 
of man. It was a magnificent eiFort, in which 
she traced the progress of the spirit of man 
from the days of Homer down to the year 1789. 
She confessed how in her pride she had regarded 
that still recent and momentous year as a new 
epoch for man, and admitted her present fear 
that in sober reality it may have been nothing 
more than a " terrible event." Though ideals 
had disappeared in that red harvest of lives, 
characters, sentiments, and ideas, she asserted 
she could never believe that philosophy to be 
false which declares for the progress of the race. 
Life without such hope of future ennoblement 
would be but a vain and arid waste. Fontanes 
observed that this book presented '^ la chimere 
d'une perfection qu'on cherche maintenant a 
opposer a ce qui est." 

Factions, jealousies, and class hatreds have 
often merged themselves in enthusiasm for a 
common cause. A national enemy unites the 
conflicting interests of a country more securely 
than any constitution, however just. Bonaparte 
welcomed the idea of the Italian campaign in 

203 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

180O5 for it would, if successful, contribute to 
his firmer establishment, and glorify him in the 
eyes of the French people. On his way to Italy 
he called on M. Necker at Coppet. Madame 
de Stael was greatly impressed on this occasion 
by his conversation and his personality, and 
could not understand her father's indifference to 
the great man. Her romantic and generous 
nature was stirred, and even in the tyrant she 
could see the hero. The glamour of meeting 
the man of destiny face to face, for the moment 
dispelled her antipathy for all that he repre- 
sented. During the lengthening spring even- 
ings by the Lake of Geneva, she watched, after 
he had gone, the spectacle of the French troops 
advancing across the peaceful country towards 
the great St. Bernard Pass, and only faintly 
wished that he might be defeated, so that 
his growing tyranny should receive a check. 
However, after Marengo the victorious general, 
^'bruni par la gloire," returned to Paris to 
receive the plaudits of the people, and Madame 
de Stael showed herself as anxious to see the 
popular hero as all the rest of the world. 

The progress of absolutism became more 
rapid after this successful Italian campaign, for 

204 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

the process known as the " senatus-consulte " 
was grafted on to the existing constitution, and 
by this means the consular will immediately 
became the nation's law. The ''senatus-con- 
sulte " was ostensibly adopted for the purpose 
of punishing and terrorising those who schemed 
against Bonaparte's administration, and the first 
use to which the new measure was put was to 
deport a number of Jacobins (said to be con- 
cerned in an attempt to assassinate the First 
Consul) to the Seychelles, Cayenne, and other 
places. The list of a hundred and thirty names 
was drawn up in a hasty and careless fashion, 
and it was never proved that any of the men 
banished were in any way concerned with the 
plot. Madame de Stael was very indignant, 
and surmised that after such a precedent any 
act of tyranny might be justified. In January 
1802 another unconstitutional act was executed. 
Benjamin Constant and nineteen others were 
turned out of the Tribunate, and twenty men 
devoted to Bonaparte were put in their place. 
Effective criticism was impossible, for public 
expression of opinion had been stifled by the 
suppression of all journals with the exception 
of thirteen (five of which soon disappeared) as 

205 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

being inimical to the Republic. Had the Tri- 
bunate continued to exist as originally consti- 
tuted, it might have proved a barrier to the 
assumption by the First Consul of absolute 
power. 

The Peace of Amiens was a disturbing sur- 
prise to Madame de Stael. Andreossy, the 
French Envoy, who went to London to ratify 
the preliminaries of the peace, reported that the 
English people were delighted at the compact, 
and that the mob unharnessed his horses and 
dragged his carriage to St. James's Palace. 
Madame de Stael reflected sadly that, if 
England, the country of the free, recognised 
the usurper, no country in Europe could protest 
against his despotism. 

Almost more disconcerting both to her and 
to the Liberals was the formal treaty made 
between State and Church three weeks after the 
Peace of Amiens. In order to celebrate the 
accomplishment of two such important pacts, 
Bonaparte arranged that a festival should be 
held in Notre-Dame. On Easter Day, 1802, 
the big bell of the cathedral broke its ten years' 
silence. Amid salvos of artillery and blare of 
trumpets the Consuls and the rest of the oflicers 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

of State went in pomp to the festival. It was 
observed by the curious that the consular 
lackeys for the first time wore livery, and that 
the consular coach was drawn by eight horses. 
Within the sacred walls so recently profaned 
by revolutionary usage Mass was celebrated, 
and at the Elevation the soldiers presented arms 
and the drums rolled. Two orchestras, con- 
ducted by Cherubini and Mehul, discoursed 
sacred music, and thus the terms of peace 
between State and Church were ratified. Ma- 
dame de Stael remained shut up in her house 
" pour ne pas voir I'odieux spectacle," which 
for her was filled with remembrance of the old 
monarchic days, and the old insolence of royal 
luxury and oppression. She and all the friends 
of liberty in France were anxious that the 
Catholic religion should not be restored in their 
country. Individually she was, like Rousseau, 
anxious for a State religion, but it was " en 
bonne Calviniste," and though nominally the 
three Christian confessions and Judaism were 
put on the same footing by the Concordat, the 
only significant factor in the arrangement was 
Catholicism. Napoleon described religion as 
order, and there is no doubt that in the Catholic 
207 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

priests he saw serviceable professors of passive 
obedience, a sort of '' gendarmerie sacree," that 
might with diplomacy be converted into one of 
the firmest pillars of his throne. It seems as if 
there must have been to his mind an essentially 
English savour in Protestantism ; for when 
negotiating for the pacification of La Vendee 
he asked that twelve inhabitants of the district 
should be sent, " pretres par preference," with 
whom to treat. " Car j'aime et estime les 
pretres, qui sont tous Frangais, et qui savent 
defendre la patrie contre les eternels ennemis 
du nom frangais, ces mechants heretiques 
d'Anglais." Bonaparte always said it would 
have been easier for him to establish Pro- 
testantism, and that he had to overcome much 
resistance in restoring Catholicism as the State 
religion. The Council of State received the 
news of the compact in silence, and neither the 
Legislative Assembly nor the Tribunate would 
sanction the measure until their numbers had 
been reduced by expulsion. Men felt that by 
the Concordat ''the most beneficial achieve- 
ments of the Revolution were undone." 

Madame de Stael began to desire some other 
weapon than her pen to fight the restoration of 
208 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Catholicism, and she thought that in the person 
of Bernadotte, who was insanely jealous of his 
master, she had found one. This General-in- 
Chief of the Army of the West affected liberal 
ideas and intrigued against Bonaparte. Not 
content with being in the thick of the conspiracy, 
Madame de Stael urged her colleagues to im- 
mediate action, as there was no time to be lost, 
since ^' forty thousand priests would be at the 
service of the tyrant on the morrow." The 
plot failed and Bernadotte escaped ; but Bona- 
parte did not forget or forgive the conspirators. 
In the late spring of 1802, Madame de Stael 
was delayed in her journey to Coppet by the 
death of her spendthrift husband at a wayside 
inn. His death was in many ways a relief to 
her, and with unchecked courage she continued 
her campaign against tyranny. Her enemy was 
about to become Consul for life, which caused 
her a good deal of anxious thought, and when a 
pamphlet named " Vrai Sens du Vote national 
sur le Consulat a vie " was printed by her 
friend Camille Jordan, giving expression to 
views of Bonaparte that coincided with her own, 
her pleasure on reading it was so extreme that 
she thought of rewarding the author by sending 

209 o 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

him a ring made of her own hair, which had 
belonged to " pauvre M. de Stael." But 
luckily she remembered before it was too late 
that Camille was much taken by the fair curls 
of Madame de Kriidener, and her pride made 
her refrain from sending the black ring. 

A month later another pamphlet appeared, 
again expressing her views. Its name was " Les 
dernieres Vues de Politique et de Finances," 
and its author, M. Necker, allowed that Bona- 
parte was "I'homme necessaire," and that the 
timely choice of a dictator had saved France 
from serious dangers. He criticised the con- 
stitution of the year VIII., traced in it the whole 
scaffolding of the future imperial edifice, and 
declared the present state of government to 
be but " the stepping-stone to tyranny." He 
complained that the Legislative Assembly, 
despoiled of its prerogatives, was unworthy of 
a free republic ; and predicted, as his daughter 
had done in ^' De la Litterature," that the 
progress of military authority must lead to 
despotism, and that " good faith should prevent 
the keeping of the name Republic for a form 
of government in which the people would not 
count." It was a book bound to make trouble 

210 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

for its author. Madame de Stael realised this 
but " could not bring herself to stifle the swan- 
song which was to sound from the grave of 
French liberty." 

Every one knew that she was the power behind 
the book. In vain she protested that it was the 
work of M. Necker, and of M. Necker alone ; 
no one believed her. The question, however, 
soon ceased to attract notice, for the election of 
Bonaparte to the Consulate for life dulled all 
interest in other concerns, and the poor hermit 
of Coppet was lost to sight in the joy with 
which the election was greeted. The Empire 
was accomplished in all but name. 

By Lake Leman the temporarily forgotten 
woman lived lamenting the eclipse of her 
party. She tried to console herself with read- 
ing Kant. It rejoiced her to discover that in 
his works she could find new and noble argu- 
ments against despotism and degradation of 
character. Unlike her friend Chateaubriand, 
for whom Nature was the melodious harp on 
which the unfathomable misery of man was 
expressed, she had no joy in scenery or changing 
lights, and could only think and write. Her 
novel, " Delphine," appeared in December 1 802, 

211 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

in Paris, and she waited impatiently under the 
elms at Coppet for the echo of her success in 
the capital. Its vogue was prodigious, for 
most of the characters were drawn from life. 
Delphine was Madame de Stael ; Madame de 
Vernon was Talleyrand ; M. de Lebensei was 
Benjamin Constant ; Therese d'Erviers was 
Madame Recamier ; the Due de Mendoce was 
M. Lucchesini, the Prussian ambassador in 
Paris. The book itself was dedicated to 
" La France Silencieuse." Talleyrand said, 
" On dit que Madame de Stael nous a repre- 
sentes tous deux dans son roman, elle et moi, 
deguises en femmes ! " Even from the distant 
Lake of Geneva, arrows found their mark, and 
wounded their destined quarry. Bonaparte 
declared the book immoral, ''vagabond in 
imagination," and a mere ''mass of metaphysic 
and sentiment." " Delphine " championed Pro- 
testantism, and declared against the "bizarre 
beliefs of Catholicism." It praised the English, 
it exalted liberty ; in short, it committed every 
possible offence against Napoleonic opinion. 
Madame de Genlis, whom Andre Chenier 
called " la mere de I'Eglise," was particularly 
angere^ by its heterodoxy. She also hated its 

212 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

authoress, and took the opportunity of its pub- 
lication to excite the First Consul against her 
and persuade him to exile her. When Madame 
de Stael arrived in Paris, the decree went forth, 
in spite of the pleading of 'her champion and 
friend, Joseph Bonaparte. Exile seemed to 
her as bitter as death itself, and of all the 
instruments of tyranny the worst. Heavy of 
heart she betook herself to Germany, to study 
its people and its literature. She had been 
much attracted to that country by her corre- 
spondence with Charles de Villers, and by her 
perusal of his translation of Kant's philosophy. 
During this new and absorbing experience, her 
diary of exile was suspended for six years. 
Shortly before her departure for Germany, she 
heard that the truce between France and 
England was broken, and remarked that Bona- 
parte had only signed the Peace of Amiens the 
better to prepare himself for war. That this 
was the general impression amongst statesmen 
cannot be doubted. Lord Whitworth regarded 
it as a truce, Pitt as a suspension of hostilities. 
In spite of the joy with which its ratification 
had been received in England, no one was 
under any illusion as to its durability. 

213 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Holland was the real bone of contention, 
though as a matter of fact no mention of 
Holland proper was made in the Peace of 
Amiens. It was stipulated that Ceylon should 
be ceded to England, and the Cape restored to 
the Dutch, but Addington did not insist that 
the independence of Holland should be recog- 
nised in this treaty. He thought that it was 
the logical conclusion of the general peace, and 
the mere execution of the Treaty of Luneville, 
which expressly guaranteed the independence 
of the Batavian Republic. Bonaparte, who had 
not concluded the Treaty of Luneville with 
England, thought he would only fulfil the 
agreements specified in the Peace of Amiens, 
and that he had no other obligations towards 
England. He evacuated Tarento, and there- 
fore expected the English to do their share, 
and evacuate Malta. Whenever allusion was 
made to Holland by the English diplomatists, 
the French replied by talking of Malta. The 
English were civil and conciliatory : they did 
not want war. It was feared that the French 
did, and early in March 1803 it was announced 
to the faithful Commons that great prepara- 
tions for war were being made in France and 

214 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Holland. Throughout the summer months 
Madame de Stael observed that flat-bottomed 
boats were being constructed in every forest in 
France, and by the side of many of the great 
roads. In Picardy a triumphal arch was erected 
bearing the words " route de Londres " upon it. 
Alarm was excited by the discovery of letters 
dealing with Napoleon's scheme for planting 
French commercial agents in the great com- 
mercial towns of England, although France 
at that time had no commercial treaty with 
England. A letter was intercepted, sent by 
order of the First Consul to the French com- 
mercial agent at Hull, asking for a detailed 
plan of that port and its approaches. Suspicions 
were aroused that these and other isolated dis- 
coveries were but threads in a great system of 
espionage, in which Bonaparte was endeavouring 
to involve England. 

Soon after these alarming incidents, the cele- 
brated scene between Lord Whitworth and the 
First Consul took place at the Tuileries. It 
was not imitated in England, for Andreossy 
was still received courteously by the Queen and 
Court. As the English Minister for Foreign 
Affairs stood by the spirit of the Treaty of 

215 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Luneville, and Bonaparte by the letter of the 
Peace of Amiens, war was inevitable. It began 
in May with the capture of two French mer- 
chant vessels, whereupon all English people in 
France (and there were over a thousand) were 
thrown into prison by the First Consul. Lord 
Elgin was amongst those arrested, as well as 
Sir James Crawford and Lord Whitworth's 
secretary, Mandeville. Such arbitrary acts were 
said to be without precedent in modern history. 
From this time forward, Napoleon's tendency 
to tyrannous abuse of power became more 
pronounced. The worst fears of Madame 
de Stael were realised. The sudden death of 
Pichegru, the banishment of Moreau, and the 
d'Enghien murder showed how unchecked was 
the course of his action either by his executive 
or by public opinion. The comedy of the 
Empire began to be played in 1804, ^^^ ^^^ 
attendance of the Pope at the ceremony of the 
coronation made it at least appear as though 
the murder of a royal Duke had been condoned 
by the Church. Order had been secured in 
France at the price of freedom ; the administra- 
tive system was working smoothly, the taxation 
of the country had been thoroughly reorganised, 

216 



Madmne de Stael and Napoleon 

the civil code composed, the press muzzled, the 
religions of the land restored. Napoleon had 
leisure at last to turn his serious attention 
to other countries. 

In April 1804 Madame de Stael had been 
recalled from her study of the German nation 
by the news of her father's illness. He had 
been dead a week when she left Berlin ; but 
this news was kept from her till she reached 
Weimar. His last days were troubled by the 
reflection that it was on account of the pamphlet 
*' Les dernieres Vues de Politique et de 
Finances" that his daughter was in exile. 
With dying hands he wrote to assure the First 
Consul that she had had nothing to do with the 
publication of the book ; in fact, that she had 
urged him to refrain from giving it to the 
world. Madame de Stael felt certain that he 
would attend to a voice which came as it were 
from the grave ; but Napoleon had long 
renounced sentiment, and merely said : *' Elle 
a bien du regretter son pere. Pauvre divinite ! 
II n'y a jamais eu d'homme plus mediocre, avec 
son flon-flon, son importance et sa queue de 
chiffres." A rumour went about that all the 
exiled were to be recalled at the coronation. 

217 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Madame de Stael waited vainly at Coppet for 
the news of her pardon, which never came. It 
maddened her to find that nobles, like the 
Rohans, Montmorencys, and La Rochefou- 
caulds, were willing to take places at the Court 
of the ** bourgeois of Ajaccio." She wrote to 
her old friend M. de Narbonne, in whose 
society her days at Juniper Hall, near Dorking, 
had been spent, reproaching him with his atti- 
tude towards Napoleon, and urging him to 
show more sense of personal dignity and more 
loyalty to his old masters. The letter fell into 
the hands of Fouche, chief of police, and 
Napoleon discovered that his assiduous enemy 
was actively trying a new method of under- 
mining his throne. She fell into further 
disgrace, and after a tedious autumn, spent at 
Coppet, went to Italy. Italy disappointed 
her ; she would have exchanged St. Peter's and 
the Colosseum, the frescoes of Michael Angelo 
and the statues of Greece, for a good constitu- 
tion for her adored country. In Italy she found 
no real life, only the dream of a past beauty, 
existing under a blue sky. Dissatisfied with 
her impression, she returned, at the end of 
June, to Coppet, to write '' Corinne." Napoleon 

218 



Madajne de Stael and Napoleon 

still kept himself informed of all she did and 
all she said, and while dictating the plan of the 
1805 campaign to Daru, wrote to his untiring 
policeman, Fouche, that he is informed that 
Madame de Stael pretends she has his permit 
to re-enter Paris, but that he is not quite such 
an imbecile as to allow her to be within forty 
miles of Paris, when he himself will be at the 
other end of Europe. 

From Coppet, Madame de Stael followed 
with intense interest the advance made by 
Napoleon's armies across the Continent. The 
liberty of many nations was threatened, but she 
remained silent, content, maybe, with the work 
she had already done, in sowing the seeds of 
Napoleonic hate and distrust in many terri- 
tories and many hearts. It distressed her to 
hear that some of the smaller German rulers 
held other and more ignorant views of his 
dominion than her own. Some of them still 
thought, as she had done before the Consulate, 
that it would mean liberty and progress, and on 
the whole the buffer States along the Rhine 
were inclined to welcome the advent of a strong 
Liberal government, such as they conceived 
would be introduced by the French Emperor. 
219 



Madmne de Stael and Napoleon 

In consequence many of their inhabitants heard 
of the victory of Austerlitz and the Pressburg 
peace without dismay. The representative of 
one of the most noble and ancient families in 
the Holy Roman Empire, Karl von Dalberg, 
expressed his view of the situation in. the 
following language to Napoleon : 

"Sire, the genius of Napoleon should not 
confine itself to the happiness of France. 
Providence wills that superior men should be 
born for the whole world. The noble German 
nation groans under the evils of political and 
religious anarchy. Sire ! Be the regenerator 
of its constitution." 

Ever since the year of Luneville, Napoleon 
had drawn up endless plans for the reconstruc- 
tion of Germany, and at this time he produced 
the Confederation of the Rhine, a document 
whereby fifteen princes of the Empire declared 
themselves " separated in perpetuity from the 
territories of the German Empire, and united 
among themselves in a particular confederation, 
called the Confederated States of the Rhine." 
This Rheinbund, having declared its indepen- 
dence of Imperial German control, called upon 

220 



Madame de Stael and Napoleoit 

the Emperor of Germany to renounce his title, 
and assume that of Emperor of Austria. In 
August the German Empire was declared by 
France to exist no longer. 

Napoleon went so far with his plans of 
reconstruction as to urge Frederick William III. 
to form a North German Confederacy as a sort 
of set-off to the newly confederated Rhine 
Provinces. This advice exasperated the King, 
and Prussia at last arose from eleven years of 
inglorious neutrality, and went to war. 

The French Emperor was so fully informed 
as to the state of Prussian civil and military 
administration that he wrote to Talleyrand : 
" The idea that Prussia will attack us single- 
handed is so ridiculous that it deserves no 
further notice." The direct result of the 
revolt of Prussia was the defeat of Jena and 
the occupation of Berlin. The secondary result 
was that the conquest revealed Prussia to 
herself, and discovered to her that it lay within 
her power to become the dominant factor in 
the eventual confederation of the German- 
speaking peoples. 

People of thought in Germany had, in the 
eighteenth century, been constrained to seek for 

221 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

progress outside their own country. Madame 
de Stael, in her journey through Germany, was 
surprised at the knowledge of French liberalism 
to be found amongst all classes. Many thinkers 
considered that France might be the regenerator 
of Germany, though they were not blind to the 
fact that in France itself the outcome of the 
Great Revolution might be the gravest form of 
reactionary despotism. There was no patriotism 
in Germany at this time ; but when it was dis- 
covered that the dominion of Napoleon meant, 
not liberty, but tyranny, the seeds of national 
sentiment, so long dormant, began to germinate. 
Is it too much to think that Madame de 
Stael, when she threatened to parade through 
all countries the misery of an exile, and to 
preach a crusade against tyranny, was partly 
responsible for the change in German opinion ? 
Is it incredible that in her many interviews with 
men of letters, such as Goethe, Schiller, and 
Schlegel ; in her talks with politicians, like 
Gentz and Stein ; her conversations with royal- 
ties, like the Queen of Prussia, the Duchess of 
Saxe-Weimar, the Russian Czar, she should 
have influenced foreign views of Napoleon ? 
She knew every one ; she had suffered greatly ; 

222 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

she was an effective enemy. It is hardly 
hazardous to assume that in her really triumphal 
procession through Germany, she helped the 
men of thought and the lovers of liberty and 
progress to realise what the conquest of that 
country by Napoleon would mean. Queen 
Louise imbibed hatred of the French Emperor 
from her ; at her instigation Schlegel preached 
against France ; in Berlin Madame de Stael 
herself announced that Napoleon was a man 
devoid of virtue and faith — a tyrant. 

Affairs soon showed the correctness of her 
denunciation. The extortions made for the 
war-chest, the heavy levies of men, the paralysis 
of agriculture owing to the withdrawal of carts 
and horses for military use, the forced loans 
from the richer citizens, soon caused grave dis- 
content in many parts of Germany, and in the 
summer of 1806 the steps taken by Napoleon 
to suppress the publication of hostile criticism 
on his authority and his army did more to 
arouse enthusiasm for liberty than either the 
defeat of Jena or the occupation of Berlin. 
The Emperor wrote instructions to Berthier as 
to the chastisement to be meted out to the six 
librarians, whom he meant to treat as scape- 

223 



Madame de Stael and Napoleoit 

goats for all the political pamphlets and poetic 
protests that were appearing at the time. 
''They shall be brought before a military 
commander and shot within twenty-four hours," 
ran the order. " It is no ordinary crime to 
spread libels in places where the French army 
is, in order to excite the inhabitants against it." 
Five of the men selected had their sentences 
commuted ; the sixth, Palm, was shot three 
hours after his sentence had been passed. Such 
an event was indeed calculated to excite revenge 
in the hearts of the writers and philosophers of 
a country whose single outlet was at that time 
literature, for it struck a deathly blow at the 
only freedom left in Germany. The universities 
swore to avenge Palm of Nuremberg, and three 
years later his bleeding image was borne on the 
standard of the Hussars of Death, raised by the 
Duke of Brunswick d'Oels. It may be said 
without exaggeration that the death of Palm 
marked the turning of the tide of German 
feeling against Napoleon. Gentz, Madame de 
StaeFs friend, wrote of the martyr in a 
pamphlet, " Germany in her profound abase- 
ment." Meanwhile in Spain the standard of 
liberty was being bravely upheld, and the 

224 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

defence of Saragossa acted as a match to the 
train of sentiment in Germany. Palafox 
became, like Palm, a name of inspiration. , 
Although Napoleon was deeply engaged in 
combating liberalism abroad, he did not forget 
his enemy at home, and when busy re-victual- 
ling his troops after Eylau, we find by his 
letters that he was still concerned with Madame 
de Stael and her machinations. In five months, 
ten letters were written to Fouche, urging him 
to be more thorough in his persecution of the 
lady. Every time the Emperor left Paris, 
there was a recrudescence of liberal thought, in 
causing which Madame de Stael had a consider- 
able share. Various small annoyances reminis- 
cent of her power seemed to haunt Napoleon. 
At Tilsit " Corinne," the new novel, was read 
and very much admired by the Prince de 
Neuchatel (Berthier) and his family. It was a 
simple novel, as its authoress said, and had no 
political taint. " Bah ! " said Napoleon ; ** de 
la politique ! N*en fait-on pas de morale, de 
litterature } " 

On the barge moored in the middle of 
Memel river further blows were dealt to the 
liberty of Europe, for there the Treaty of 
225 p 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Tilsit was signed. Napoleon was at last master 
of Germany. 

Besides the treaty openly signed upon the 
barge, there were other private agreements 
made between the contracting parties with 
reference to England. It was the secret clauses 
in the Treaty of Tilsit that occasioned the 
bombardment of Copenhagen, which Byron 
and others who had no knowledge of these 
clauses thought a crime. The existence of 
secret articles planning the future destruction 
of England caused her to maintain her hostile 
attitude towards France. 

During the vintage days of 1807, Madame 
de Stael entertained Prince Augustus of Prussia 
at Coppet. She found him distinguished in 
manner and charming in conversation ; he was, 
moreover, patriotic and readily sympathetic 
with her views about Napoleon. Admiration 
for Madame de Stael and love for beautiful 
Madame Recamier, her guest, caused the prince 
to keep up an active correspondence with both 
ladies after he had left their neighbourhood. 
The French Emperor, owing to his splendid 
system of espionage, read the letters that passed 
between them, and thereby discovered that 

226 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Madame de Stael's influence was being exercised 
to convert the charming prince into a plotter 
against the existing situation in Prussia. He 
caused the suspect to be carefully observed, 
and in the winter received a report from the 
Governor of Berlin to the effect that Prince 
Augustus entertained seditious ideas, and was 
endeavouring to spread them amongst his 
compatriots. The *' Journal de I'Empire," 
commenting on the affair and on the source of 
the prince's disloyal notions, said he had been 
at Coppet where " il faisait de la cour \ 
Madame de Stael, et parait avoir puise dans 
cette derniere residence de forts mauvais 
principes." The enmity of Madame de Stael 
was as untiring as the Emperor's vigilance, 
and it began to appear as though the one un- 
conquerable thing in Europe was a woman. 

The rest of the Continent appeared supine, 
and the princes and rulers of its conquered 
provinces were to all seeming demoralised ; 
the Congress of Erfurt, which followed the 
Peace of Tilsit, was a mournful revelation of 
their attitude. They bowed their necks to the 
yoke and suffered themselves to be treated 
without honour. To us who come after, this 
227 






Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

congress but proves the unimportance of the 
things that are seen, and the importance of the 
things that are not seen. The efforts of the 
liberators in Europe were having invisible but 
certain effects, and in 1809 the Archduke 
Charles gave vent to the suppressed sentiments 
of the nations, as he addressed the troops he 
was about to lead into battle against Napoleon, 
with these words : " The liberty of Europe has 
taken refuge beneath your standards ; your 
victories will break the chains of your German 
brethren, who, though in the ranks of the alien, 
still await their deliverance." 

With joy and expectation Madame de Stael 
and many other enthusiasts, like Stein, Fichte, 
Jahn, and Benjamin Constant, listened to the 
ominous rattling of the Napoleonic fetters in 
Europe. The prisoners seemed at last to have 
realised their desperate case ; the silence at last 
was broken. Madame de Stael's role became 
increasingly important, for the eyes of many a 
liberator turned to the shores of Lake Leman 
for encouragement and inspiration. Napoleon 
was acutely annoyed by her correspondence with 
Gentz, and by the knowledge of all the in- 
fluential friends she had made and kept in 

228 



i 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Germany. By his orders, she was watched 
even more closely at Coppet ; her friends were 
considered as seditious persons, her very ac- 
quaintances became suspects. Sl^ said that it 
seemed as if Napoleon wished to imprison her 
in her own soul. To superintend the publica- 
tion of her book on Germany, she moved to 
Chaumont-sur-Loire. Though the censors had 
passed the corrected proofs, Napoleon, on 
reading the book before publication, ordered 
its instant suppression and her immediate exile 
from France. Savary told her that it was 
destroyed " because it was not French ; " and 
Goethe thought its destruction a prudent 
measure, from a French point of view, because 
it would have increased the confidence of 
Germans in themselves. The last three chapters 
in the book were those in which, in the name 
of enthusiasm, she eloquently protested against 
the spirit of the Empire. The book appealed 
too strongly to the passionate though sleeping 
love of liberty in Europe to make it anything 
but a firebrand. It was destroyed for its poli- 
tical tendency, but its merit lies in its being an 
impression of the world of thought in Germany 
in 1804. 

229 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Back again at Coppet " in the prison of the 
soul," she was visited by the devout and fasci- 
nating Madame de Kriidener and her fellow 
missionary Zacharias Werner, the Rosicrucian. 
Under their influence, she became extremely 
religious. Werner read " The History of Re- 
ligion " by Stolberg with her, and when he left 
Coppet not only had Benjamin Constant come 
under his influence, but so also had William 
Schlegel : both contemplated writing religious 
works. Schlegel read Saint-Martin with deep 
attention. Madame de Stael plunged into the 
*' Imitation of Jesus Christ." At the end of 
1 8 10, Coppet might have been the haven of a 
society of religious. 

As her faith grew, she became calmer and 
almost thought that God, in sending her so 
many troubles, intended her to be a noble 
example to her age. In spite, however, of the 
consolation of religion, life became more and 
more difficult at Coppet. Madame de Stael 
was mortified at every turn. M. de Mont- 
morency, on coming to spend two days with 
her, received at her house a nicely timed letter 
of exile in which it was indicated that his 
friendship with the authoress necessitated this 

230 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

decree. The letter was delivered to him in her 
presence, and caused her such agony of mind 
that she drugged herself with opium. Madame 
Recamier, who in answer to repeated invitations 
was due to arrived at Coppet shortly after this 
event, was entreated by courier not to visit 
her would-be hostess, who was in terror lest the* 
same fate should overtake her expected guest. 
Madame Recamier, nothing daunted by these 
warning messages, spent a few hours at Coppet, 
and then continued her journey. She was imme- 
diately exiled from Paris. M. de Saint Priest, 
an old friend of M. Necker, was exiled from 
Switzerland for holding intercourse with 
Madame de Stael. Nearly every post brought 
disquieting news about friends who had been 
exiled for their relations with her. In Switzer- 
land every one, from Prefect to Customs Officer, 
treated her as suspect. Every one who came to 
Coppet was watched, letters were intercepted, con- 
versations repeated. Life became intolerable, 
but in spite of this, and of a friend's warning 
to remember Mary Stuart's fate, — "nineteen 
years of misery and then a catastrophe," 
it was terribly difficult for her to abandon 
Coppet and all its memories. The idea of gaol 

231 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

was horrible to her. Some one had told her 
that one of the bravest defenders of Saragossa 
lay in the dungeons at Vincennes so unnerved 
by solitude as to cry all the day long. Finally 
she decided to leave the much-loved inland sea, 
and tried to get a passage for America ; this 
was denied her, as also was the permission to 
settle in Rome, but after various efforts she and 
M. Rocca, her husband, escaped to Innsbruck 
and travelled by way of Salzbourg to Vienna. 
Their adventures were numerous, and in Austria 
she just missed being arrested by French spies. 
Crossing the Russian frontier on the anniversary 
of the Fall of the Bastille — that symbol of 
tyranny — she registered a vow never again to 
set foot in a country subject in any way to the 
Emperor. Since the direct road to Petersburg 
was occupied by troops, the travellers went 
south to Odessa. During this long journey 
Madame de Stael consoled herself by planning 
a poem on Richard Coeur de Lion, and by the 
time she had reached Odessa her companions 
had to use persuasion to prevent her going on 
to Constantinople, Syria and Sicily, the scenes 
of his adventures. Russia held no beauty 
for her. The vast wheatfields, cultivated by 

232 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

invisible hands, the sad birch-tree endlessly 
repeated by an uninventive nature, the rolling 
steppes, the absence of mountains to arrest the 
eye, the roadless wilderness, the isolated villages, 
all seemed to her unutterably monotonous and 
sad. She drove all day with fast horses, but 
the landscape made the journey seem like a 
nightmare in which, though always galloping 
forward, she never moved. The advance of 
the French armies haunted her. It was possible 
that even at the further end of Europe she 
might be placed in a ridiculous or a tragic 
position. Observing the quiet bearded faces of 
the peasantry and their religious demeanour, she 
feared that they were the very people to submit 
themselves with docility to the Napoleonic yoke. 
After weeks of driving, she saw the golden 
domes and painted cupolas of Moscow. It 
seemed to her more like a province than a town. 
Men were strenuously preparing for the inevit- 
able war. Self-sacrifice and courage were to be 
met with at every turn, and Madame de Stael 
became an ardent admirer of the Russian nation. 
Count Rounov was raising a regiment at his 
own expense, and would only serve in it as a 
sub-lieutenant ; Countess OrlofF sacrificed part 
233 



Madame de Stael aitd Napoleon 

of her income; peasants were enlisting with 
enthusiasm. Entering the Kremlin and' climbing 
the tower of Ivan Veliki, she contemplated 
Moscow spread out like a map at her feet, and 
tried to count the minarets and domes of the 
city churches and of the great monasteries in 
the plain. How soon, she wondered, would 
Napoleon be standing in that very tower, 
monarch of all that she now surveyed. A 
month later Moscow was in flames. The retreat 
to the Beresina had begun. 

At Petersburg she was received with homage. 
The Czar Alexander, who was the pupil of La 
Harpe, and so imbued with the idealistic view 
of the Revolution, welcomed her. Owing to 
the subjection of Europe, nearly all those 
persons who were the enemies of Napoleon, 
French emigres, Spaniards, Swiss, and Germans 
like Arndt, Stein, and Dornberg, had gradually 
been drawn to Russia, and had taken refuge in 
its capital. Stein was delighted to hear frag- 
ments of " De I'AUemagne " read aloud by its 
authoress one night at the OrlofFs. *^ She has 
saved a copy from the claws of Savary, and is 
going to have it printed in England," he wrote 
in a letter to his wife. An eager audience leaned 

234 



Madame de Siael and Napoleon 

forward in order to lose no word of the last 
chapter on "enthusiasm." They found it in- 
toxicating. She spoke as "the conscience of 
Europe," as " the representative of humanity." 
The Czar flattered her and treated her as " an 
English statesman would have done." He did 
not attempt to conceal his earlier admiration 
for Napoleon or his subsequent resentment at 
discovering himself to be his dupe. He de- 
plored the immorality of the tyrant, and shared 
the view of Roumiantsof, his Chancellor, that 
it was Russia's celestial mission to deliver 
Europe. He had made up his mind that 
Bernadotte of Sweden was to initiate the de- 
fection of the German princes from French 
allegiance. That prince was deeply interested 
in his adopted country, and hated the notion 
that it should enter the Napoleonic confederacy. 
Just at the time the French were entering 
Smolensk he concluded a secret offensive and 
defensive alliance with Russia at Abo, though 
without pledging himself to immediate action. 
Since Madame de Stael had so much influence 
on Bernadotte, Alexander hoped that her ap- 
proaching visit to Sweden would persuade him 
to seal his words by deeds. Travelling by way 
23S 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

of Finland, she deplored the dreariness of the 
scenery. Dull forests, composed of birch and 
fir, frowning mountains, granite rocks, " great 
bones of the earth," made her long for the 
gentler climates of southern Europe. At Abo 
she embarked on a " frail ship " for Stockholm, 
and Schlegel remarked on the terror she 
displayed at the prospect. Established in 
Sweden, she began to organise vast conspiracies. 
Her house became the home of all Napoleon's 
enemies, and the centre of an organised secret 
service with the European courts. Madame de 
Stael urged her friends to recall the exiled 
General Moreau from America to take com- 
mand of the allied troops against Napoleon, 
and both the Czar and Bernadotte agreed with 
her that it would be well to secure him. Ber- 
nadotte was rather frightened by her activity ; 
he did not like being rushed into extremes, and 
he could get neither money from England nor 
men from Russia to carry out any scheme. His 
fears caused him in a little while to send to 
St. Petersburg to try to undo the newly made 
treaty. Meanwhile, no stone was left unturned 
by Madame de Stael that might prove of use 
to the allies, and in February 1813a small book 

236 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

appeared at Hamburg, "Sur le Systeme con- 
tinental, et sur ses rapports avec la Suede." It 
was a fierce pamphlet against Napoleon and his 
policy, and a direct invitation to Sweden to join 
Russia, and to England to deliver Europe from 
tyranny. " England," it said, ** alone remained 
afloat, like the ark in the midst of the deluge." 
'*The fate of Denmark was pitiable — could 
Sweden submit herself to such indignity?" 
" Happily, though, that was impossible, since 
Sweden had committed her destinies into the 
hands of the Prince Royal." Who was the 
anonymous author ? The work bore a strange 
likeness to Madame de Stael's "Essay on 
Suicide," which appeared at Stockholm in 1812 ; 
some of the phrases used were almost identical. 
People wondered whether it was by her. 
Madame de Stael protested that Schlegel 
wrote it, and it was quickly reprinted with 
Schlegel's name attached to it. But every one 
felt convinced that she was the originator of 
the little book. Shortly afterwards she found 
another opportunity for pleading the cause of 
liberty by guiding the pen of Rocca in his 
" Memoirs of the War in Spain." With inde- 
fatigable enthusiasm did she seize all oppor- 

237 



Madame d£ Stael and Napolemt 

tunities for educating public opinion against 
t\Tanny. When Bernadotte had been finally 
pushed into action and had left for Stralsund 
to command the North German troops, taking 
both Schlegel and Albert de Stael in his suite, 
Madame de Stael went to London in order to 
be a transmitter of news from the centre of all 
fresh intelligence. 

To scheme and plot in public affairs was at 
the moment the occupation of every important 
political person in Europe. The Czar was 
endeavouring to force Metternich's hand, and 
to secure the friendship of Prussia. The French 
Emperor was engaged in trying to bribe Austria 
and Russia to allegiance. The Austrian Chan- 
cellor was watching for an advantage that might 
give his country a chance of becoming^ the 
arbiter of other nations' destinies. The in- 
trigues and treaties that led up to the capitula- 
tion of Paris before the allies, the history of the 
diplomacy of the period, is immensely compli- 
cated, but at length a net capable of enmeshing 
the lion was constructed. 

Napoleon realised his danger and tried to 
break the meshes woven by his would-be 
captors. He essayed to prevent Prussia from 

23S 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

concluding an alliance with Russia by offering 
to make Frederick William III. King of Poland, 
and to hinder Austria from allying herself with 
either Power by the tentative bribe of Illyria. 
In spite of his efforts, the nations negotiated 
among themselves and quietly drew up and 
signed agreements for concerted action, while 
expressing outwardly to Napoleon their satis- 
faction at the existing state of affairs. In 
March (1813) war was declared with the 
avowed object of freeing Germany and breaking 
up the Rheinbund. Many treaties were drawn 
up proposing different terms to France ; but 
eventually it was decided to march on Paris, 
and demand the restoration of the Bourbon 
dynasty. The day of retribution had come. 

When it was proved, by the proclamation of 
Louis XVIII., that a great tyranny was at last 
overthrown, a curious change came over 
Madame de StaeFs spirit. She was at last free 
to return to Paris, but on landing at Calais she 
felt a pang of regret that her old enemy was 
beaten, her patriotic heart bled after ten years 
of exile to see Prussian uniforms on the landing 
pier, Cossacks at St. Denis, Austrians and 
English bivouacking about the Tuileries, and 

239 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Russian Guards on the steps of the Opera 
House. She hardly recognised her beloved 
city, and was in despair at this her horrible 
return. In spite of her cosmopolitanism she 
was not denationalised, and France was still 
the adored country of her soul. And yet it 
was the moment of her greatest triumph : ^*En 
Europe il faut compter trois puissances : 
I'Angleterre, la Russie, et Madame de Stael."* 
She did the honours of Paris; all worlds met 
at her house. Throughout her life, faithful to 
the idea of liberty, and only hating Napoleon in 
so far as he impersonated despotism, she com- 
miserated him now that he was a prisoner. 
Knowing the weakness of the Restoration, the 
'* Hundred Days " afforded her no surprise. 
Napoleon on his return from Elba said he 
knew " combien elle avait ete genereuse pour 
lui pendant ses malheurs." He tried to in- 
gratiate himself with her : " J'ai eu tort," he 
said to his brother Lucien ; '' Madame de Stael 
m*a fait plus d'ennemis dans son exil qu'elle ne 
m'en aurait fait en France." t He no longer 
ignored her extraordinary influence throughout 

* Madame de Chastenay, " Memoires," vol. ii, p. 445. 

t P. Gautier, ** Madame de Stael et Napoleon," p. 369. 

240 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Europe, nor the power of the friendships she 
enjoyed with the great of all countries ; he 
meant her to be his ally in the future, and 
through Joseph Bonaparte tried to secure her 
friendship, and even interested himself in 
Mademoiselle de Stael's marriage prospects, as 
a means to this end. Joseph wrote to Madame 
de Stael in April 1815 : 

'* La France est aujourd'hui une avec 
I'Empereur ; il veut donner plus de liberte que 
vous n'en voudrez . . . vos sentiments, vos 
opinions peuvent aujourd'hui se manifester 
librement, elles sont celles de toute la nation, et 
je me trompe fort si I'Empereur ne devient pas 
dans cette nouvelle phase de sa vie plus grand 
qu'il ne I'a ete." 

He went so far as to tell her that he had over- 
heard Napoleon saying that there was no word 
in " De I'Allemagne " to which objection could 
be taken ! 

All the friends of liberty in France had 
imagined that .Napoleon would return from 
Elba in the same mind as that in which he 
went away. His new proclamations astonished 
them. There was to be no vengeance of any 

241 Q 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

kind. Benjamin Constant was summoned by 
the returned Emperor to discuss liberal ideas 
with him. It was possible to doubt sentiments, 
but not acts. The promise of public discussion, 
of responsible ministers, of the liberty of the 
press, and of free elections secured even 
Lafayette's allegiance. Waterloo followed too 
soon upon this profession for any man to tell 
what Napoleon would have accomplished with 
his new policy. The contest that had lasted 
for fifteen years was over. Napoleon went to 
his island grave,' and Madame de Stael survived 
his disappearance but two years. 

It must be confessed that Madame de Stael 
and the party to which she belonged judged 
the condition and situation of France in 1799 
less well than Bonaparte. They believed in 
democracy as the panacea for all ills, and in the 
immediate possibilities of the people. If 
cynicism consists in seeing things as they 
actually are and not as they might be, Napo- 
leon was a cynic who, to reduce a turbulent 
and uneducated mob to order, allowed his 
policy to justify the worst fears of reasonable 
as well as sentimental liberalism. He lacked 
the understanding of the soul of peoples. 
242 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

Unlike Madame de Stael, who made it her 
profession to discern that soul, he recognised 
no important factor in nationality and made the 
error in his calculations of reducing all men to 
a common denominator of stupidity or wicked- 
ness. He had a profound contempt for that 
which constitutes the real wealth of human 
nature, generosity, enthusiasm, idealism, al- 
truism, and regarded the subjects of such 
delusions as victims fit for trickery or tyranny. 
In Madame de Stael he was forced at length to 
acknowledge a soul made inconquerable by love 
of liberty and to recognise the strength and 
permanence of an idealism he contemned. 

Napoleon, as it were, summed up in himself 
the old inflexible ideals of military government. 
He might well be called the last of the Romans. 
His calm imperial brow bears the ever-green 
wreath of fame, but it is the fame of an older 
day, and though it is but a hundred years since 
he dominated Europe, he ranks with the classic 
conquerors of antiquity, and not among the 
passionate experimenters of the modern world. 
Madame de Stael belongs to another category 
and may be counted among the prophets. She 
believed in the future of the people ; she 

243 



Madame de Stael and Napoleon 

believed that acts might one day be co-extensive 
with ideals; and in accord with these beliefs 
she spoke and lived. In the long duel she 
was the victor, for the principles she upheld 
triumphed. She clung to her beliefs in liberty, 
and held that personal dignity springing out of 
individual freedom is necessary to man if he 
to be neither a savage nor a slave, and that the 
independence of the soul founds the indepen- 
dence of States. These convictions she confessed 
for many dangerous years in all ardour and 
sincerity, and every day justifies her protest, for 
moral and human considerations affect the 
public conscience ever more and more acutely, 
and have become since her day a present 
and integral part of all politics. Madame de 
Stael's lonely cry has been echoed by thousands. 
Napoleon was dethroned by the revolt against 
the old conceptions of government which he 
embodied no less than by the cannon of Leipzig 
and Waterloo. 



*44 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



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And other books too well known to be mentioned. 



250 



INDEX 



INDEX 

AccUEiL, Loge du Tendrc, 35 

Addington, 214 

Adh6mar, Mme. d', 68, 104-7 

Adoption, Lodges of, 35 

AfFry, M. d', 86, 87, 89, 91 

Amiable, 7, 32 

Amis R^unis, Loges des, 31, 53 

Amis de la Vertu, Loges des, 36 

Andreossy, M., 206, 215 

Anhalt-Zerbst, Princess of, 97 

Antin, Due d', 20, 22, 24 

Apollonienne, Societe, 31 

Areopagites, 39 

AsKmole, Elias, 16 

Aucler, Quintus, 160 

Augereau, 164 

Autun, Bishop of, 119, 130 

Babceuf, 54 

Bachaumont, li 

Bacon, F., 16 

Bailly, 32 

Barnave, 54, 138 

B arras, 164 

Barre, de la, 115, 116 

Barruel, 5, 13, 37 

Barthelemy, 159 

Baure, 25 

Beccaria, 9, 66^ 122 

Bellamare, 70 

Belleisle, 76, 83, 86, S7, 90 

Bentinck, 88, 90 

253" 



Index 



Bernadotte, 209, 235 
Bernier, 173 
Bernis, 83 
Berthier, 222 
Bieberstein, 103 
Blester, 103 

Blanc, Louis, 7, 32, 37 
Bode, 54 

Boehme, Jacob, 29 
Bonaparte, N., 164, 174 
Bonaparte, J., 172 
Bonneville, 52 
Bossuet, 114, 171 
Bouillon, G. de, 19 
Boulanger, 57, 66 
Bourbon, Duchesse de, 33 
Bourbons, 106 
Brissot, 32, 54 
Broglie, Due de, 81 
Brunswick, Duke of, 224 
Busch, 54 
Byron, 226 

Cabanis, 32 

Cagliostro, 36, 47, 49, 50, 52, 56, 61, 66, 103 

Calvin, 198 

Cambon, 162 

Cambon, Mile., 20 

Casanova, 60, 99 

Catharine II. of Russia, 10, 71, 81 

Cazotte, 48, 61, 66, 105, \q6 

Cerutti, 32 

Chapelot, 20 

Charles II., 18 

Chartres, Due de, 26 

Chateaubriand, 174, 211 

Chatham, 69 

254 



Index 



Chenier, A., 32, 54, 148, 212 

Chenier, M., 7 

Cherubini, 207 

Chevaliers, Bienfaisants, 57 

Chevaliers, d'Occident, 27 

Choiseul, Due de, 71, 83, 84, 87, 89, 102, 103 

Christina, Queen, 72 

Clement XII., 21 

Clermont, Comte de, 24, 25 

Clootz, Anacharsis, 160 

Clive, 68, 81 

Cobenzl, 78, 79, 98, 99 

Colbert, 113 

Cook, Captain, 32 

Condorcet, 13, 54, 57, 122 

Consalvi, 172 

Constant, Benjamin, 201, 202, 205, 242 

Corday, Charlotte, 159 

Costanzo, 38 

Couteulx de Canteleu, 6, 37 

Couthon, 161 

Crawford, Sir James, 216 

Croix, de la, 31 

Cromv^ell, O., 17, 122, 198 

Curchodine, 202 

Czarogy, 70 

Dalberg, Karl v., 220 

Danton, 32, 54 

Daru, 219 

David, 167 

De Maistre, 163 

Dervi^entwater, Lord, 18 

Desaguliers, 17 

Deschamps, Abbe, 5, 37, 42 

Desmoulins, Camille, 32, 45, 54 

Diderot, 22, 122 

255 



Index 



Dubois, Cardinal, 114, 159 

Dumas, 33 

Dupont de Nemours, 129 

Edelsheim, v., 96 

Elgin, 216 

Emery, M., 124, 136, 139, 149, 156, 157 

Empereurs, d'Orient et d'Occident, 27 

Encausse, Gerard, 6 

Enghien, Due d', 216 

Eon, Chevalier d', 8 

Esperance, Loge du Triple, 36 

Etalonde, M. d', 116 

Fabre, d'Eglantine, 160 

Fauchet, 32, 124 

Felicite, Loges de la, 33 

Fenelon, 19, 114 

Fichte, 228 

Fleury, Cardinal, 21, 82 

Fontanes, 203 

Forster, 32 

Fouch6, 161, 218 

Franklin, B., 32 

Frederick the Great, 10, 47, 68, 69, 96 

Freemasonry, 18, 21 

Gabrionka, 36 

Galitzin, 88 

Garat, 5, 31, 41, 192 

Genlis, Mme. de, 33, 35, 71, 78, 212 

Gentz, 222 

George II., ^'j 

Gerle, Dom, 32, 120, 137 

Gobel, 138, 141, 158 

Goethe, 222 

Gower, Lord, 84 

256 



Index 



Girardin, Stanislas de, 192 
Gregoire, 54, 125, 137, 146, 175 
Guillotin, 32 

Hanna, 32 

Harnwester, 18 

Hausset, Mme. de, 78 

Haussonville, 173 

Hebert, 31 

Heguerty, 18 

Heine, 162 

Helvetius, 31 

Hesse, Prince Charles of, 7 1 

Holbach, 122 

Holdernesse, Lord, 84, 87, 91 

Hume, 15 

Illuminism, 28, 37, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 68,98, 
Intel^gence, Loge de la Parfaite, 36 

Jahn, 228 

James II., 18 

John XXII., Pope, 14 

Jones, Paul, 32 

Jordan Camille, 209 

Juigne, de, 128 

Kant, 213 
Kauderbach, 88,90 
KaunitE, 79 
Knigge, Von, 37, 52 
Kriidener, Moae. de, 210, 230 

Labrousse, Suzanne, 47 
Lacorne, M., 25 
Lafayette, 106 

257 



Index 



La Harpe, 32 

Lakanal, 136, 195 

Lamartine, 30 

Lamballe, Princesse de, 33 

Lamberg, Cr. v., 80, 100 

Langes, Savalette de, 31, 54 

Laraguais, M. de, 11 

Lareveillere-Lepeaux, 164 

Lespinay, Jean de, 20 

Locke, 15 

Loge Grande, 22 

London, Grand Lodge of, 17 

Louis XV, 20, 48, 65, 71, 76, 81, 82 

Luchet, Mde., 5 

Ludovisi, 126 

Luther, Martin, 30, 122 

Lux, Adam, 159 

Luxembourg, 26 

Mandeville, 216 
Marat, 54, 161 
Maria Theresa, 3 3 
Marie Antoinette, 157 
Marillac, Dragonnades of, 114 
Marmontel, M. de, il, 32 
Martin, Henri, 7, 32 
Martinists, 117 
Martinezistes, 23 
Maskelyne, 18 
Massillon, 14 
Maurepas, M. de, 104 
Maury, Abbe, 124, 130 
M6hul, 207 

Meric, Monsignor, 135, 156 
Mesmer, 5, 48 
Mesmiont, 126 
Metternich, 238 

258 



Index 



Mitchell, 91 

Mirabeau, 52, 57, 103, 119, 124, 127, 128, 130, 136 

Miroudot, 141 

Montmorency, 142 

Moreau, Si6, 236 

Mounier, 5 

Naigeon, 122 

Nantes, Edict of, 113 

Napoleon, 146, 170, 181-244 

Necker, 201, 204, 210, 211 

Neuf Soeurs, Loge des, 31, 32, 56, 144 

Nicolai, 33, 52, 103 

Noailles-Mouchy, Duchess de, 157 

Observance, Lodge of Strict, 38, 52 
Orient, Grand, 26, 27, 33, 49, 54 
Orleans, Due d, 54, 119 
OrlofF, 71, 97, loi, 102 

Palafox, 225 

Palm, 224 

Pantheisticon, 16 

Papus, 6 

Pascal, 119 

Pasqually, M. de, 28 

Pelew, Sir Edward, 165 

Perfectibilists, 38, 40, 41, 50 

Perfectibilists, Doctrines of, 46, 5 2 

Perkins, 59 

Pernetti, 36, 100 

Peter, Czar, 71 

Petion, 32, 54 

Philalethes, 31, 52 

Pichegru, 216 

Pitt, 71,84, 213 

Poiret, 19 

259 ' 



Index 



Pompadour, 69, 71 76, 'j^, 85, 99 
Pope, 51 

QUESNAY, 78 

Ragoczy, 70, 71 

Ramond, 148 

Ramsay, A, M., 18, 19 

R^camief, Mme., 169, 226, 231 

Rewbell, 164 

Robespierre, 157, 161 

Robison, 51, 187, 192 

Rocca, 252, 237 

Rochefoucauld, Due de la, 32 

Rochette, il 

Roederer, 193 

Rohan, Cardinal de, 51 

Roland, M., 150, 152 

Roland, Mme., 124 

Romme, 32, 160 

Roumiantsof, 235 

Rounov, 159, 233 

Rousseau, 9, 15, 29, 40, 60, 69, 119 

Sachs-Gotha, Duke ot, 45 

Sachs-Weimar, Prince of, 45 

Saint-Etienne, 33 

Saint Germain, 47, 49, 6$^ 68, 70, 71, 74, 'jd 

Saint Just, 54 

Saint Martin, L. C. de, 29, 30, 49, 51, 58, 61 

Saint Pierre, B. de, 167 

Saint Priest, 231 

Salamon, 141, 153 

Santerre, 54 

Savary, 219 

Sayer, A., 17 

Schiller, 222 

260 



Index 



Schlegel, 222, 230 
Schroepfer, 43, h6 
Sieyes, 32, 54, 124, 127 
Soltykoir, 70, 102 
Stael, Mme, de, 187-244 
Stein, 222, 228 
Stolberg, 236 
Swedenborg, 28 
Swedenborgians, 36 

Taine, 8, 12 

Talleyrand, 124, 125, 136, 138, 139, 220 

Tallien, 153 

Templars, 57 

Theophilanthropists, 166 

Thiebault, 69, 100 

Thomas, 69 

Toland, 15 

Treilhaud, 132 

Turgot, 122 



Unverdorben, 69, 97 
Urf6, M. d', 79 

ViLLERS, Charles de, 212 
Voltaire, 9, 15, 31, 32, ddy 69, 144 
Voyer, Comtesse, 34 

Wales, Prince of, 74 

Walpole, H., 68, 69, 73 

Walsh, 74, 75 

Watn, 91 

Watson, 81 

Weishaupt, 37, 38, 42, 43, 49, 99, 103 

Weldon, Chevalier, 70 

Wemyss, 19 

Werner, Zacharias, 236 

261 



Index 



Whitworth, Lord, 213, 215 
Willermooz, 29, 52 
Williams, D., 167 
Wren, Sir Christopher, 17 

YoRKE, General, 85, 86, ^'j 
Young, Arthur, 127 

Z^L^E, la, 35 
Zurmont, M. de, 98, 99 
Zwack, 37 



3!+77-7 



